What Is Bootstrap and Why Is It Needed?

The problem

Creating websites from scratch requires a lot of time and effort. Styling every element, adding a hover state, etc., is exhausting and repetitive.

In addition, we can face the following difficulties:

• Maintaining a consistent design.
• Creating a responsive design.
• Learning enough JavaScript to implement necessary components.

The solution

Bootstrap is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first, front-end web development. It is easy to use and learn. It helps develop websites at a faster pace and maintains consistency of appearance and feel across the application.
Let’s look at an example of how a Bootstrap button looks compared to a default HTML button.

The addition of just two classes, .btn, and .btn-primary, has made the button aesthetically pleasing. This is a just a tiny sneak peek at what Bootstrap offers.

Bootstrap provides us with many features and components, such as typography, a carousel, and a navbar, just to name a few. We’ll learn about all of these in detail in the upcoming lessons.

Why Bootstrap?

Apart from solving development issues, other reasons to learn Bootstrap are:

• Popularity: Many companies use Bootstrap as their front-end CSS framework, so it’s a great investment for those who want to become front-end developers.

• Compatibility with browsers: Bootstrap supports almost all the latest major browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, etc.

• Availability (open source): Bootstrap is an open-source framework, i.e., the code is readily available for everyone to read and contribute.