HTML & CSS Advice

[amyLou]

I've been using HTML and CSS for sometime now and have created a number of websites with it. I have included some jquery in them, and mostly learned everything I know from Lynda.com tutorials. I'm looking to add some more modern and advanced features to my repertoire like parallax, scrolling components like modals, etc. So I turned to bootstrap to do some of this stuff. But ultimately I feel like so much of the site I could more easily create and style content using html and css. Bootstrap isn't as flexible and customizable as I would like it to be. And I feel like I am having to learn a lot more as far as syntax, but am actually doing a lot less. Am I headed in the right direction? Or is my hesitation in continuing to learn bootstrap warranted?

 

[ivan.moony]

Hi amyLou

This reminds me of a situation that may happen in old times when assembler (HTML+CSS) was the only language for programming. Then Fortran (Bootstrap) was crated, and people widely used it. But besides Fortran (Bootstrap), there may exist other approaches, all based on assembler (HTML+CSS).

Though I never used it, it is normal that Bootstrap makes things simpler, that's what it is built for. There should be some drawbacks in a form of flexibility or speed performance, but those should be economical trade-offs in a favor of simplicity of use.

 

[amyLou]

Thank you for your response and you're very much on the $. I guess a better way to phrase my question would be, are there any alternatives to bootstrap that are less restrictive? I've done a couple Wordpress sites, but I feel as though I'm spending a lot of money when I could be learning some of the code myself. I've done basic JavaScript. Maybe I am asking what paths other people have taken to be able to make very well-executed, professional, modern sites? Or is there a standard method for learning these things?

 

[ivan.moony]

I don't know about other people, I can speak only for myself. Even though I didn't sell any sites yet (I have have experience merely with client languages/SQL), I'm not satisfied with the current Javascript+HTML+CSS offering. I just feel it could all be done in a more concise way instead of dragging a thirty years old technology along the way. On my to-do list, is scheduled a replacement for those three riders of the apocalypse in a form of a self-sufficient single unifying language that compiles to those three. I'm thinking of something like Elm, but more flexible.

But, don't take me for granted, my knowledge about broad site development isn't that much wide that I could recommend this or that tool from the plethora of currently available addons. Anyway, knowing Javascript+HTML+CSS+ServerScripting would give you a good measure of addon libraries you'd potentially buy and use. With that knowledge you could estimate how long would it take for you to create similar libraries and decide if it is worth of trouble. Probably there are some overpriced products, but I believe most of them reasonably save your valuable time when building new sites. You just have to find and pick the right combination for the right project.

And what that combination may be, maybe someone else could recommend something more meaningful. Informations that could help to answer your question are: what type of sites do you want to build, do you need server side scripting, databases, maybe some online store requirements, what is complexity scale of sites you want to build, amount of visitors you try to reach, how many time you are prepared to spend on your projects, ...

(For smaller and extremely simple sites [because of the library properties], my own library comes with royalty-free restrictions for all CodeForum members, without any purchase.)

 

[amyLou]

Thank you so much. You have not only helped me on a technical level but also in lassoing my scattered thoughts into an organized and more precise line of questioning. You have been a big help.