Learning Bootstrap: Unearth the potential of Bootstrap to create responsive web pages using modern techniques

Reusability: In web designing, a modular pattern is favored as you do not have to rewrite code for various portions of your design. Bootstrap has ready-made components, CSS styles, and plugins that can be included directly in your code. This aspect saves you a considerable amount of time and effort resulting in rapid development. Moreover, this results in easy code maintenance and helps you organize your code efficiently.

Consistency: Easy code readability is crucial for a designer. It also helps that the designers working with you or assigned the same project can understand the code well so as to implement modifications and alterations. As Bootstrap uses ready-made code snippets and is compatible across different browsers, there is a high degree of uniformity in your designing process. This also lowers the learning curve for new designers who want to build on the same project or implement a similar functionality on different projects.

Flexible grid layout: Bootstrap has a default Grid system that can scale up to 12 columns with the relative increase in the screen size and with the flexibility to opt for a fixed or fluid responsive grid. Apart from this, Bootstrap is flexible as you can add any number of customized columns that you may need on a row-by-row basis using its built-in LESS variables and mixins. Using the variables and mixins, you can determine the number of columns and the gutter width as well as the media query point, which decides the threshold for floating columns in addition to generating semantic CSS for individual grid columns. Offsetting and nesting can be implemented easily, with a few lines of code. Using Media Queries and responsive utility classes, you can also manipulate certain blocks of content by making them appear or hide based on the screen size.

Customization: You can customize Bootstrap significantly using the built-in Customize option, where you can choose the features that you want to use and uncheck features you don't want, making it as bloat-free as possible. You can use a Custom CSS sheet to override Bootstrap's default styles in addition to using LESS files for CSS preprocessing. Using LESS, you can use variables and mixins to alter almost every defined default attribute. Moreover, you can customize the way plugins such as Modals and Alerts work using advanced JavaScript. As SaaS compatibility and customization were introduced in the latest version of Bootstrap, you can create complex and interactive websites with Bootstrap.

Vibrant community with extensive third-party initiatives: Bootstrap has an active community of developers as well as immense third-party support wherein there is continuous improvisation. Bootlint, an HTML linting tool for projects using Vanilla Bootstrap, was released recently, which helps you identify incorrect Bootstrap usage errors. JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS are used in conjunction with Bootstrap resulting in the creation of Mobile Angular UI specifically tailored for mobile-based designing. Another recent development is the installation of Bootstrap using the Node package manager. Bootstrap Bay (http://bootstrapbay.com/), Bootply (http://www.bootply.com/), and Bootsnipp (http://bootsnipp.com/) are some of the third-party websites that host a wide range of templates, editors and builders, and tailor-made snippets that help you streamline your web designing using Bootstrap.

Futuristic outlook and open development: The development of Bootstrap is explicitly carried out on GitHub. You can follow all the changes implemented and view the records of outstanding issues with the facility of reporting Bootstrap-related errors and bugs, in addition to contributing to the future development of Bootstrap. The project roadmap can also be found on the official website along with facets such as backward compatibility among the challenges to be addressed in the near future. Bootstrap is a framework that incorporates HTML5 and CSS3 in addition to a plethora of toolsets and utilities thereby shaping up to becoming a benchmark and a vital cog in the wheel for futuristic design and development.