Web-Design: My First Baby Steps
22 Feb 2024
Pure HTML & CSS vs. Bootsrap 5. I think the benefits of Bootstrap are clear. My Ghibli Collection recreation website is clean and well-formatted, which my surfing website is well…kind of a mess. That’s not to say that using Bootstrap was much easier because it definitely was not for me. I found the navbar especially confusing at first. It required an jumble of nested class: navbar, nav, container, navbar-brand, container again, nav-item. I remember lamenting for about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to orient some of my items to the right in the navbar. Is it “text-align: right” in the navbar? Nope. What about “mr-auto”? Also nope. What if I just add padding to make it look like it’s on the right? Definitely not. At times it felt like a hopeless game of flinging commands at the wall and hoping something sticks. Advice from ChatGPT was hit or miss and solutions from StackExchange were helpful, but were often way more complicated than what I needed. I also was stuck on trying to get gutter space in between my columns. I copy-pasted example code of columns with gutter space EXACTLY from the Bootstrap website just to see how it behaved and when I opened Chrome the columns still didn’t have gutter space and I legitimately felt like I was losing my mind. I ended up finding code that actually worked from a godsend on StackExchange. It was often the case that I would get stuck on small problems like that for a long time; problems that I never thought would be so troublesome.
For me, a large part of using Bootstrap is referencing previous projects. Especially for the navbar, I’m constantly switching tabs, looking back or copy-pasting old code when trying to build something new. I hope with more practice I’ll have a better, innate understanding of Bootstrap.
Despite the difficulty I had starting with Bootstrap, I like designing websites. It’s so cool being able to create websites that actually look clean and professional. Plus I love projects that involve aesthetics. There’s still a ways to go in learning web design but I’m enjoying it so far.