Jack of all trades, master of none.
Why Bootstrap Admin Templates suck?
I’ve been designing User Interfaces for web and mobile apps for almost 10 years now, and since 2013 I’ve also been creating Bootstrap Admin Templates. Over the last 3 years, I’ve sold more than 30k admin templates and I’ve worked with a couple of well-known Silicon Valley and startup companies.
Currently, we can find plenty of Bootstrap Admin Templates on the web, but in my opinion, majority of them isn’t good enough to be used in our projects.
There are several reasons Bootstrap Admin Templates aren’t good enough.
The first problem is that we (authors) sell templates via Themeforest and Wrapbootstrap. When you sell your templates via those channels, you don’t get to know who your customer is. I’ve never had a direct contact with my clients and I haven’t got a chance to talk with them about their motivation and expectations. It means, I’ve been creating products for an unspecified target group solely on the basis of my own assumptions.
Authors don’t know their clients and thus we get a bunch of fully featured and universal Bootstrap Admin Templates equipped with tons of unwanted features and third party plugins.
Marketplace requirements are another problem. Authors have to keep original Bootstrap CSS and JS files and overwrite them in separate files. It generates unnecessary CSS and JS code.
The next one is Bootstrap. It is a powerful and universal framework which comes with a grid and a bunch of styles and scripts for many components like navs, tables, cards, lists or forms, but to be honest, most of them are useless and there is no place for them in our projects. For example, who needs “jumbotron” in their admin panel?
Taking all these things into account, I’ve decided to create CoreUI. It is a simple and lightweight open source Bootstrap Admin Template which offers some basic features needed to create an admin panel or a dashboard.
I wanted to keep CoreUI as lightweight as is possible, so I decided to remove all the unnecessary Bootstrap components. But no worries, CoreUI comes with source SCSS files, so you can add these components if you need them. You can also find some new features in my Bootstrap Admin Template, like sidebar menu, switches, aside toolbar, sign in page, signup page, charts and widgets.
As I mentioned before, CoreUI is absolutely free and you can download it on Github. What’s more, you can report a bug or request a new feature using our Github account.
Why do I do this? What is my motivation? I think that admin templates available on the web right now are not good enough and I would like to change it. In order to do so, I need to learn more about my target group and clients. I need to know more about your motivation (why do you use admin templates?) and your expectations (which features do you need?).
I hope that CoreUI will be useful to you. Your feedback will be appreciated.
