Hi everybody. Many times, if you're talking to people who do web design, you've got the people who think, I hate Bootstrap, and other people are like, I love Bootstrap. Why is bootstrap so popular, and to be honest, so hated at the same time? I think one of the key reasons is because there are so many free templates out there for us to use. So if someone hands you a bunch of code, you're going to say thank you, and probably use it. But that also tends to infuriate some people who really believe that every website should be unique and original. Let's go ahead and talk about some of those free templates that I'm talking about because, if it sounds really good to you, I want to get you in the right direction. This first link comes from getbootstrap.com. These are just the ones that provide you when you first get started. These other two, bootstrapzero.com and startbootstrap.com, these are just ones I found either through word of mouth or through a search engine. Let's take a look. So here I am at the getbootstrap.com kind of default page where you can find out where to download, and where to get the different links, and things like that. What I'm going to show you is that if I quickly scroll down, [SOUND] Not only will they give you a basic template for where you can start your pages with a simple, hello world. They also include a lot of different examples of other templates. So you could click in and say, you know what? I want this template right here. I want my site to look like this one right here. Or I really like the look of this one. And you can use it to build very basic templates. Again, nothing too fancy, because the assumption is that you're here to learn, more than to use as your professional site. If you want to go a couple steps up, let's go ahead and take a look at this next option. So here here I am at bootstrapzero.com, and you can see that, again, they're listing a bunch of free Bootstrap themes. They tend to go in these general ideas of, do you want it to be a landing zone, do you want it to have kind of a dashboard look, you can pick. So if I clicked on this landing zone theme, I'm going to go right here, Then, what you get is a much more detailed description of what kind of things you can have. It mentions that it's built for laptop and mobile view, as well as well as different views. It can talk about different things that you use. Different keywords, we use Bootstrap and the grid, and we use a form, and we have a video background. But what you probably really care about at this point is, what does it look like? So let's hit this preview button right down here. And quickly you can see what the page would look like on the different platforms. I'm going to resize the screen, and you go a little bit further down. And they have that kind of drop down menu here. Still have the video, they talk about their reflexive layout. So this is great and all, but what do you with it if you really like it? What you do is they always offer this download option right here. And you can download the code and then start playing with it yourself. The same is true if you go to Start Bootstrap where you can get other themes and templates. Again, it's open source which means it's absolutely free and you can use it. You don't need to pay them. You don't need to do anything special. People like to help others and not only that, they like the idea of people using their code. If you can kind of mention it in your comments, give them a thumbs up, it's going to help them become better programmers. So again, they break it down in different ideas. Do you want a blog page? Hey, let's go ahead and preview and download that one. Each one of these elements are going to have things that you really like about them, but they might have some things that you don't like about them as well. So how do we use them? I mentioned that one of the things you can do is you can just download the code. But before you go across and you go, that one's awesome, I really like the look at that page, you need to decide if the template is really going to support your content. Go back, say hm, what are the important parts of my page? What is it that I want to emphasize? You don't necessarily want a streaming, cool video in the background if it doesn't fit your content. That's when you download the code. Find that template that's going to work really well for you, download that code. And then, you will need to modify the HTML. You'll go in, every place they have the stuff about themselves, you're going to replace it with the content you want to display. This is why it's so important to understand at least some HTML and some CSS even though there's free software out there. If you don't have that basic understanding, you're really left at the mercy of other people. When you know a little bit, it can really help you make huge changes in the templates. The last thing you're going to do after you add your components, or to be honest maybe even before. These two, maybe you can kind of switch back and forth, is that you might want to add or remove different components of the page. So if they have, like I said, a video, and you have no use for videos, that's okay. Just take it out of the HTML. You can also take it out of the CSS if you really want to kind of improve performance. If they use a kind of layout where it's three columns, and you only want two, that's okay. You can go in and just remove the parts that you don't want. If you're feeling really powerful, you can also go in and add parts that you do want. So using Bootstrap is really that easy. Even if you don't understand HTML or CSS, or you understand JavaScript but you hate it so much, it's still possible for you to create a really great looking site using Bootstrap or really any other template at all. The thing is, I think if you can use them but make changes because you know a little bit about these things, your site not only is going to look so much better, but you can be really proud of knowing that you had a hand in creating something so great.
