As a junior computer science student, I’ve gotten comfortable with HTML and CSS through different assignments and personal projects. At first, building pages from scratch felt like a good way to learn. I had full control over every color, margin, and layout. But as I started working on more complex projects—especially in group settings—I began to see the limits of doing everything manually. That’s when using Bootstrap 5 completely changed the way I approached building websites.
Bootstrap didn’t feel overwhelming to me. If anything, I was surprised by how much it helped. After reading some basic documentation and trying out a few class names, I could quickly build pages that were not only functional but also looked professional. The grid system was one of the first things I got used to. Instead of spending time adjusting widths and floats, I could just use row and col classes, and the layout would respond on its own. That responsiveness—especially across mobile and desktop screens—was something I used to struggle with using raw CSS.
I also appreciated how consistent everything looked right away. Buttons, cards, and navbars all followed the same design language, which helped my projects feel more polished with less work. I didn’t need to spend time aligning everything perfectly or testing every screen size. Bootstrap just handled it.
I still think it’s useful to know how HTML and CSS work at the core. In fact, understanding them makes using frameworks like Bootstrap much easier. But for anything beyond a very basic site, writing all the layout and styling by hand starts to slow things down. And when you’re trying to meet a deadline, build something with a team, or focus on the functionality of a site, spending hours on spacing and fonts doesn’t feel like the best use of time.
Frameworks like Bootstrap solve those common layout problems in a way that’s reusable and scalable. Instead of copying and pasting the same styles across multiple files, I just apply the right class names, and the framework takes care of the rest.
Learning a UI framework like Bootstrap 5 has been one of the most useful things I’ve done this semester. It hasn’t replaced my need to understand HTML and CSS—instead, it’s made me better at using them in a real-world way. I can build faster, collaborate more easily, and spend more time on the logic and features of my projects.
For any student trying to build cleaner, more responsive, and more scalable websites, I’d definitely recommend taking the time to learn a UI framework. Once you start using it, it’s hard to imagine building without it.