At work I get to update an internal application with Bootstrap. I was already looking into for my own personal development. And am pleased to have the opportunity to work on it while getting paid. I am not a designer and consider myself a CSS hacker. I ‘m not always aware of best practices in CSS (though I am working on it) but I can often figure things out. And joke that I make websites “not ugly”.

All of our applications are internal apps and clients/vendors have to use them. We have no designers and much of our stuff is not pretty.

Since some applications were created to replace paper forms we often tried to make them look as close as possible to the paper form. This is not necessarily attractive.

By removing the assumption that app should look like the paper form and using Bootstrap, I’d call the application  ‘almost pretty’. 🙂

In the process I am also cleaning up the JavaScript. We have been using jQuery and jQuery UI and other plugins.  I was the one that introduced jQuery to our group when I was still a novice. As a result, there is a lot of repeated code and even multiple versions of jQuery were included on various pages.  This also result of copy-paste because multiple developers work on it and sometime deadlines make best practices difficult.

I am a firm believer in writing DRY (Do not Repeat Yourself) code and love cleaning things up. Adding front-end validation and replacing ColdFusion’s UI tags with JavaScript/jQuery.

The result is more elegant code, less repeated code, and more consistent code. AND a better looking, performing application.