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CSS Framework Basics Prototyping with Bootstrap Building Modal Windows and Forms

Posted by sakatagintoki
sakatagintoki
12,624 Points

Question about customizing Bootstrap

In the prototyping with Bootstrap exercise, Guil went to the customize section of getbootstrap.com and specified colors and styling for text, navbars, jumbotrons etc.

Is it much better to do it this way? Rather than, for example, downloading the default Bootstrap zip file and overwriting default Bootstrap styles in an author-created stylesheet?

Very nice course by the way. This needs to be in the Web Design and Front End Web Development track (if it hasn't been added already)

Thx ~Jay

2 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points

Depending on how much overwriting you'll be doing, customizing bootstrap before compile can lead you with less CSS bloat. All of those default bootstrap CSS classes you override are still going to load increase file size, even though they are overwritten, and too much of them will start to create performance problems for the website.

If there are a lot of changes to the default bootstrap, in development mode it might not hurt to develop the site overriding default bootstrap classes since you're not as concerned with performance while you're developing, and once that's done than extract your custom styles, and create and download a custom version of bootstrap that would be leaner and thus faster.

sakatagintoki
sakatagintoki
12,624 Points

I guessed as much. I guess I'll do as much planning as I can before I start working with Bootstrap on my next project.

Thanks.

jamescool
jamescool
44,592 Points
jamescool
jamescool
44,592 Points

If a given project will have a determinate theme (for example if a designer has already created comps and they've been approved), or if you're fairly certain that you'll never use the default styles, I see no harm in making these decisions prior to building the pages. If your project is very small, the decision will likely not make a huge difference either way since any overwriting or reverting will be very easy.

sakatagintoki
sakatagintoki
12,624 Points

That's what I needed to know. I tip my fedora to you sir.