Being a part of the modern IT industry and doing some kind of web development comes with its fair share of practices and common ways of working. If you and your company want to stay relevant and not get overtaken by the many competitors on the market, you simply have to work at least as good as everyone else before you can even begin to think about doing better than them and slowly chip away at their portion of the market.

In the world of web development there are more than a few such practices and one of them deals with admin templates. In order to make things easier for everyone especially the administrators on projects, special platforms and software exist that gives them the opportunity to use templates and overlook and edit everything from one and the same place. In today’s article we will discuss these bootstrap admin templates as they are called and determine the best ways to use them. More importantly we will reveal to you the most common mistakes you will definitely want to avoid.

To learn more about free bootstrap admin template solutions as well as to check one of the best currently available platform of this sort, make sure to visit https://coreui.io/.

The Original Bootstrap

By definition, bootstrap is a free and open-source cascading style sheets (CSS) framework meant for front-end web development. It also features JavaScript (JS) templates and can help with all sorts of solutions around the forms, typography, navigation, buttons, and many other parts of a common interface a project may require.

The original authors of the original Bootstrap are Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton who worked for Twitter and came up with the idea in August of 2011. By now there were five editions with Bootstrap 5 released on May 5, 2024. It is currently an HTML, CSS, and library that dramatically simplifies the whole development process mostly for informative web pages.

The main features revolve around the colors, sizes, fonts, and layouts of the ongoing projects. With the rest of the similar admin templates it has become a staple and a go-to form of web development tool. With the libraries and frameworks it provides, you do not have to spend too much time worrying about the look especially in the initial stages of development.

Bootstrap is also a verb in the computing world, which means loading a program into a computer with only a few initial instructions which are enough to enable the rest of the program to be introduced. Basically, it is the act of starting with limited but sufficient resources in order to make something much more complex and effective down the line.

Avoiding the Mistakes

Now that you know more about bootstrap admin templates, it is time to learn what mistakes to avoid.

1. Choosing the Wrong Design

With something that is made and meant to help you with designing the project in the best way possible using the most the platform allows you, choosing poorly right from the start will ensure a bad experience and an unsatisfying project. You may struggle to find the one you need or have in mind but that hardly means that you should settle. A number of factors dictate the design selection but it mostly has to do with what you wish or have to achieve. Pleasing the eye is important but it should never compromise functionality. Make sure to always get a live preview through the demo option to see if it works in your case. Check everything and only continue if you truly like every aspect of it. Settling is no way to develop web pages.

2. Complicated Code

Another very important aspect of the admin template you are considering is its code structure. Since the tools are made to help you do things faster and prepare the whole project for the more complicated things to come down the line, you do not want the coding to be overly complicated and already hard to deal with. It should be a breeze and give you satisfaction to use. The best practices should be followed by the code and it should be simple and straightforward to understand. Many developers spend too much time tinkering with the bootstrap section of their project and lost crucial hours and days in the process. Keep it simple if you want to make it optimal.

3. Paying Too Much

Paying too much for the bootstrap solution, or paying anything for that matter, is a mistake that developers often choose to make believing they are taking the more secure way. Not all paid solutions are better than the ones which come free of charge. In most cases, free versions are complete enough to help you do everything you can and all it takes is a little research. You do not want to overpay for a bootstrap admin template and use it once either, so if you want something on the professional side of the spectrum, make sure you will be using for a long time and in dozens of projects to come.

4. Not Reading Reviews and Ratings

The easiest mistake to make is not reading about the admin template you are about to go with. Learning more about everything that is useful to you can never hurt as having the right amount and type of information on your side can help you a lot. The internet is full of information and a Google search is all that separates you from learning more about the template. Read the reviews and experiences of others who used it already and check the ratings. This can be enough to make a difference and it usually does.

5. Using an Unpopular Option

The number of downloads the bootstrap admin template has can also be clear indication of how good and popular it is. Developers often make the mistake of not checking this and learning the truth the hard way. You do not want to find out that the template is not suitable or even usable when you have already spent time working with it. Always check the number of downloads and combine this info with the reviews and ratings. This ensures that you are truly using the best variant there is.