A week after I wrote this article, I decided not to go with Bootstrap, and stuck with Webflow. Read why here.

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Just over a month ago, I released the NurseryPeople Website. It is an updated website for landscapers and guys who are nursery professionals to find where they can purchase plants.

I designed the website in Webflow, which is a great visual program for designing pretty much any kind of website visually with HTML and CSS. I am pretty happy with the design, as I was shooting for something really simple and visually pleasing in order not to bore our users, but I have decided to rebuild the site with Bootstrap.

What pushed me to this decision.

Webflow is a great design program, and for sites that I manage within the program, I love it. Making changes is so fast, and publishing is so easy. I can quickly make an update to a site and it is live as soon as I hit publish.

That being said, Nursery People is not hosted on Webflow. In fact, the website is built with 10's of small partials, views, layouts and vue components. It is not so easy to update the NurseryPeople website as it is for my other sites hosted on Webflow.

In order to update the site, I need to first make the change in Webflow, save the site, prepare the site for export, upload the css and javascript into my laravel app, run npm processes, then push the site to git.

If I make a change to a class name, I need to make sure to edit all the places within the NurseryPeople website where I used the class in the html. This includes all of the layouts, partials, views, and Vue components in the app. Big job. Of course, I can do find and replace, but remembering is the question.

We are planning major upgrades to the site.

Right now, I am planning a "posts" area of the Nursery People website where users will be able to post their questions and advice. I want to be able to implement this quickly, while also being able to update the layout as we make changes. Doing it the way I am now will slow us down a little.

Does this mean I am done with Webflow? Of course not. For this project, it just makes more sense to design the site with Webflow, and use a css framework for the actual live site.

Why Bootstrap?

I have decided to use Bootstrap for the CSS.  

Why?

Laravel, which the site is built on, is set up to support Bootstrap right out of the box, but that isn't the main reasoning.

I looked into Tailwind, and Bulma as well, but I decided to use Bootstrap as I don't want to write a ton more html (tailwind), and I would like some js functionality so that I don't have to build vue components for the navbar etc. (Bulma & Tailwind don't have js included).

Therefore, Bootstrap.

Will the design stay the same?

Most likely, the design will stay very similar. I want the new site to look pretty similar, but I will take advantage of the components that bootstrap offers in order to speed of dev time and clean up some things I have been meaning to work on anyways.

Wish me luck!