Web design: 7 wonderful CSS Bootstrap themes in 2024 — confirmed?
Boost your websites or the websites of your clients with the right design.
Why does a ready-to-use theme matter?
First of all, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, i.e., you save a lot of time, money, and effort in the development by just assembling the building blocks provided by the theme.
Concretely, $50 for a theme in a single-use license is really nothing. The working time you invest in development from scratch is far more expensive (compare your opportunity costs).
It is also extremely challenging — especially for CSS newbies — to design (!) and create a complete, awesome-looking theme and make it even mobile compatible.
Nevertheless, if you really want to be so crazy, use at least the ‘de-facto standard’ Bootstrap as a fundament to make your life a little easier.
(IMO Bootstrap belongs to each modern tech stack)
Side note: Bootstrap also offers you free-to-use, high-quality icons with a nice style for a lot of use cases.
What should you pay attention to?
If you have finally come to your senses and, contrary to your first intuition as a motivated tech coder („I can do this on my own”), have opted for a ready-made theme, then you should definitely pay attention to the quality of the theme or its code and the following features:
- Easy to use with an install instruction or readme and documentation
- Easier changing of the whole color scheme (e.g., within a _user.scss or _variable.scss file)
- All components present should be available in the ‘engine’ or programming language (e.g., Nunjucks, React, …)
- Meanwhile a standard: dark/light theme mode
- Definitely standard: modular and responsive design or mobile compatibility, i.e., the web pages render well on all screen sizes and resolutions while ensuring a high usability/user experience.
Well, let’s stop the pre-skirmish and finally present my seven favorites, or just for me and my team: the greatest, available themes of all time.
1. Around by Createx Studio
Even though the Apple design is my absolute favorite (out of competition), the Around theme comes close. More specifically, Around is a multi-purpose theme, which is especially useful for nice looking, simple, colorful landing pages (currently, 20 ones) and ‘simple’ websites with a main focus on design and special ‘animations’.
The code quality is very high, and the components are well-documented.
2. Metronic by Keen Themes
Metronic is the world’s #1 dashboard theme with over 110k+ sales, 7.7k+ 5-star reviews, and development since 2013 (self-declaration).
Due to its long market presence and constant updates, it is very stable. and well-suited for enterprise dashboard apps.
Unique: It also supports many frameworks such as Vue, React, Angular, Node.js, Sring, Laravel, and many more. However, not all components or pages are ‘translated’ or integrated into respective programming languages. Often, you only have a starting template in the target programming language, and you have to move the raw html template to it.
Nevertheless, one of the most comprehensive theme suites we have worked with so far. You will definitely find the right theme for your project.
3. Falcon by Themewagon
Another theme for enterprise dashboards is this one, namely Falcon. We often use it for ‘serious’ enterprise apps of established companies.
Falcon offers a large set of ready-to-use components that cover everything you need in the dashboard or SaaS projects.
The theme is also available for React, where you can directly use the style in ‘native’ React components.
By the way, Bootstrap with React is our favourite frontend tech stack we use in nearly all our clients’ projects. Highly recommended.
4. Booking by Webestica
As the name already reveals, this theme is our first choice for all kinds of booking projects.
Booking covers all topics around hotels, traveling, and car rental. All imaginable components that one could require are included.
Available at https://booking.webestica.com/landing/
5. Silicon by Createx Studio
Another awesome design theme by Createx Studio (the same author as Around, see 1) is this one, namely Silicon.
Silicon is also a modern colorful theme with minor 3D / shadow effects; it is well-suited for startup websites. Specifically, Silicon also has around 20 landing pages with a main focus on design and special ‘animations’.
The code quality is very high, and the components are well-documented — as typical for this author.
6. Geeks by Codescandy
This Geeks theme contains both landing pages and dashboards, covering a wide range of topics, e.g., e-learning, SaaS, job listings, and projects, just to name a few.
The theme also includes a complete React version with all templates, which makes fast development possible.
The support team is really quick in responding to and fixing minor bugs — no further issues found after an update. The code quality is also high, and most of the components are well-documented.
7. Messenger by 2theme
Last but not least, a really nice chat theme, namely ‘Messenger’.
Messenger contains all the features that modern messengers/chat apps used by millions of users also have. This includes single chat, group chat, profile, contact list, settings, and many more.
Available at https://offsetcode.com/themes/messenger/2.2.0/
All listed themes meet the requirements we set out at the beginning of this article and are in use in our client projects.
Disclaimer: Design is primarily a matter of taste, and this article reflects a subjective view of my taste as well as the taste of my team and many of our professional clients. None of these themes are created nor sold by me or my team…not yet. However, we are enthusiastic users of these themes in our numerous projects and can attest to their high code quality.
Please vote for your favorite theme, or write below if you know any other awesome ones that we can review.
Some of my other related well-performing stories:
- Tech What? THE Tech Stack We Use for All Our $10k-100k Enterprise-level Projects — and Why This One?
- From Zero to Lil’ Hero: Your First Production-grade API With Spring Boot 3 in 60 Minutes
- Outsource Your Life — Business Owner Recommends
- How I Started My Full-time Business Life With 10X — And How You Can Do the Same.
- Start Your 6-figure High-Priced Web Agency Within One Year — Realistic or Utopian?
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