Could a definitive How To be added separately.

I bought Bootstrap Studio 11 months ago and found it not very intuitive. However have taken a second look and upgraded Version 5.4 and found I was mistaken.

Searching the Forums isn't very helpful and some replies are unhelpful, almost rude. I've found more help via a Google search with "Bootstrap Studio" and the question and an external (from here) page or Youtube video.

What I'm suggesting is a more definitive How To section, separate from Help. It took me hours to figure out how to place an Image logo in a gradient NavBar, and how to change the gradient (direction) and colours. These should be oe To's that work with easy directions and the only replies to add more options.

I've been writing websites since Mosaic 1993? but nothing for work since around 2006/7 and so didn't or rather couldn't afford to upgrade Dreamweaver. I've looked at and bought other programs last 2-3 years but in all honesty I think Bootstrap Studio is the best way to go.

Ian

I"m considering creating a BSS course. It's something I'm still investigating.

The thing about Bootstrap Studio is this... This is not "drag-and-drop" software for people who don't understand how websites work. It's a very powerful, and sophisticated program that is open-ended enough to let you build almost anything you want in terms of a static (front end) website based on Bootstrap. When I had to go from my old software and hand-coding to something with a framework that could produce a responsive website, I spent many months investigating many different software and cloud-based programs for my business. I eventually settled on Pinegrow because it ticked all the boxes. Soon after, I discovered Bootstrap Studio and never looked back. Pinegrow works fine, but BSS is 100 times more pleasing to use (though perhaps not quite as powerful in all areas.)

Unfortunately, Bootstrap Studio's homepage markets BSS as being quite a bit more "user-friendly" to non-web people than it actually is. As a result, many people buy it who basically have no coding, HTML, CSS, or JS skills. They don't understand the underlying technology that websites are built upon, nor do they want to, and they expect a program that is closer to the experience one gets with one of the popular WYSIWYG online builders like Wix or Weebly or Squarespace. Then, when they try to use BSS, and find that there are a mere 3 example vidoes (plus about 4 more on their YouTube channel) and a very spotty tutorial which omits glaring, fundamental aspects of using the program, they understandably become discouraged, and head to straight to the Help and How To forum to ask (what are 90% of the time) noob website development questions. Meaning, their questions have little to do with using BSS, which is what that forum is supposed to be for. It's not meant to teach people how to build websites. As total novices, Bootstrap Studio is too complicated for them to figure on their own, and they expect someone here will give them the "Help and How To" that they need.

End result. Someone here helps them, or BSS loses a client.

These forums are almost entirely user-to-user based. The devs pop in every week or two to look over the bug reports, maybe comment on some of the ideas posted, but there is virtually ZERO interaction from them in terms of problem solving unless it's something very program specific. So the lion's share of the "support" in these forums is given by about 5-6 users who (at least a few of us) do website development for a living. Yet, I probably spend 30-60 mins a day in this forum answering questions, and helping people. That's basically like me giving $50-$100 away to a perfect strangers out of the goodness of my heart to teach web development! I must be nuts!

So you can understand why sometime, some of the answers here can seem a bit rude. The few of us who answer most of the questions here are, quite frankly, exhausted. We've spoken to the developers about allowing us to create a real user manual for BSS and they rejected the offer. They won't even upgrade to better forum software. They are entirely focused on improving BSS, and adding new features (which is hard to get upset about,) but it does leave the glaring problem of dozens of newbies buying BSS studio and showing up here in the forums every week to ask questions like, "how do I make my image into a link that you can click on, and also have it get darker when it's hovered over?" They ask this because there's no obvious way to do this via drag-n-drop in BSS, there's no tutorial or video for it, and it really requires knowledge of how to write CSS. Meanwhile, when the person bought BSS, they had no clue they would need to know how to write CSS in order to do all but the most basic things.

Bootstrap Studio is a revolutionary website builder. With its productivity features and specialized Bootstrap tools, you can create everything from a prototype to a fully working website.

This is totally true, if you've got the ability to write CSS, are familiar with Bootstrap and its helper classes, and are able to figure out how to do things that aren't in the tutorials or sample videos. As a website developer with 10+ years experience, when I get stuck with something website related, the last place I go to look for help is the Bootstrap Studio Forums. I go to Google, and usually end up on Stack Overflow. But if I had bought Bootstrap Studio when I first got started building websites, I would have been quickly frustrated, and given up, and probably ended up on Wix or Weebly (which are abysmally BAD, EXPENSIVE builders filling up the web with bloated, slow GARBAGE websites while they're making millions, but that's another story.)

So yes, I and others have well recognized the problem of the lack of a full-featured "How To" manual for this software.

Consider the following... Webflow came out in 2013, and Bootstrap Studio came out in 2015. Now don't get me wrong. I love Bootstrap Studio, and it's an absolute steal at $65 with lifetime updates and 5 free websites. But Webflow now has over 100 "how to" videos on its YouTube Channel. Bootstrap Studio has seven, Webflow has incredibly thorough documentation that covers every aspect of the program. They don't teach you how to code, but they do teach you how to do anything Webflow can do. Webflow uses Discourse for their forum software and they have 70,000 members and dozens of categories, so there's exponentially more help available. Bootstrap Studio uses a free Wordpress plug-in for it's forum that basically sucks. They have 5 categories (only 4 that you can post in,) and they have no interest in upgrading the forum. There are only about 10-20 users here on a regular basis (and only 5-7 who consistently provide ongoing support to new users.)

Today, Webflow is worth $350-$400 million dollars, does $20 million a year in sales, has 150 employees, an affiliate program, and has grown 100 times from what it was. They've adding a CMS, 100's of templates, e-commerce, and and dozens of other features that Bootstrap Studio lacks. But they're also charging anywhere from $150 to $500 a year for their software, which gives them the working capital to scale the business.

I don't say this to be disparaging, but only to make a point... Bootstrap Studio has less than 10 employees, and I'd be shocked if they did over a half-million in sales in any given year. Because they're charging $65 for a program that's easily worth $200, (or at least $65 a year) which would give them the money they need to hire more staff, write a manual, and turn this this software into something like what Webflow became. Because BSS is an absolutely great piece of software, but it's going nowhere fast because it turns off new users who don't know how to code.

Those of us who use BSS every day to make our livings are thrilled that the developers are a small, dedicated team that didn't get greedy, and always put the quality of the program and the needs of their users first. But this program could be SO MUCH MORE, and just putting together a REAL user manual that helps beginners get a site built would be a huge benefit that they don't seem to realize they're missing out on. Every person who buys BSS for $25, gets frustrated, quits and never renews or upgrades is lost revenue.

Because they didn't put first things first, and write a real, comprehensive user guide for their own software.

I have to concur with Printninja, the forums can get pretty daunting lately with all the newbies to web design expecting us to tell them how to make things in their websites so if you've found "rude" posts, that's most likely why. I'm not here to teach you or anyone else how to build websites, that's what I get paid to do and spent the past 18 years doing and learning, over and over as coding changed over the years. I don't really intend to justify it any further than that. People that come here that want to build websites, just have to know that they need to learn how to code some, because without it, it's not going to happen with this app, and I personally hope it stays that way myself. I don't really intend to justify it any further than that.

There is a great need for instructional materials from videos to manuals for BSS, that is not an understatement and you have every right to expect that, but that doesn't mean we'll see that any time soon. Hence ... rude replies happen :P

"There is a great need for instructional materials from videos to manuals for BSS, that is not an understatement and you have every right to expect that, but that doesn’t mean we’ll see that any time soon. Hence … rude replies happen ?"

I think my points are missed in a way, and yet you (both)agree. :D It's about helping each other. There are some very small things that would make a huge difference. First a better search mechanism for the Forum, that's simple and easy, usually just an Advanced Google search. Second there are some Videos (Tutorials) on-line for Bootstrap Studio just not linked to or referenced to here. Third links to outside useful Bootstrap Resources like www.w3schools.com.

Fourth and the most important is "So yes, I and others have well recognized the problem of the lack of a full-featured “How To” manual for this software." that could come quickly with input from the membership/users. Some of the information is already on the Forum but needs extraction and put in a more concise way.

A separate comment would be that people adding components make some information available on customising etc, I've seen this with one component where the contributor had a link to the information on his own website, but that could easily be a link to something here.

I've spent two years looking for the right new website design program (I use(d) a 2014 version of Dreamweaver,, I can't justify Dreamweaver or Webflow, and don't want to go down the Joomla/Wordpress route. The more I play with Bootstrap Studio the more I regret not exploring it further last year and what a brilliant powerful tool it is.

Ian

And I know we both also agree that the users here could help a lot with that documentation, and if searched on the forums we have already done so many times over for some topics. But, I did offer to help them with this exact thing a few years back and was told they had just hired someone to do the documentation ... but I think that person got assigned elsewhere as they have only been on the forums intermittently and the documentation has had only spuratic updates and nothing major. Trust me, we've been through it all in here trying to find ways to get documentation going so that people have the ability to learn this program on their own without us having to answer the same questions over and over and over ... so far, no love on that. The good news is that most of the answers you seek are probably already on the forums. The bad news is that they are Wordpress based forums, so they are very limited in what can be done with them so searching is a bit frustrating.

I am glad you decided to give the app another try though. I've been using it for years and still find things I didn't know it could do lol. Yep, documentation would have fixed that too :P

Thank you for the valuable feedback. I agree that our documentation is lacking. This is mainly because Bootstrap Studio started as a tool targeted at frontend developers familiar with Bootstrap, and the basics didn't need explaining. These days the app is used by learners of all ages, so we should do more to help them.

I also agree that the forum is lacking. I am putting it on top of my todo to get Discourse running and migrate the forum. I think we can make a category there for community contributed How Tos. We'll then integrate that category on our Tutorials page. This will solve both the problems with the forum and the lack of documentation at the same time.

The comparisons with Webflow are appreciated, and we can learn a lot from them. But it's worth keeping in mind that they are a startup and their purpose is to grow at all costs, charge as much as users are willing to pay, and eventually sell the business. In contrast our goal with Bootstrap Studio is to build an affordable desktop app that you buy once, use as much as you wish, and be certain that it'll still exist 10 years from now.

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Sounds great @Martin, will be looking forward to those changes immensely! Thanks so much! Holler if you need anything at all from us to make this happen.

Thanks Martin, greatly appreciated, while I like and Subscribed a few days ago to the free for life deal I think that there's also a two way contract in that and where possible we should contribute back to help your team improve Bootstrap Studio.

Ian

@IanG You can contribute back. You can make suggestions to improve the program, and often times they will be incorporated into updates/future releases. I've done this more than once.

But I think if you're talking about creating new content like expanded tutorials, lessons, more "how-to" videos, etc... I'd say feel free to do this yourself if you want to help others, but I wouldn't expect to see the developers add your content to their tutorials. They seem resolved to handling this in-house, and at their own pace.

There are 2 or 3 (I believe) independent BSS tutorials on YouTube. For example... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oiMAzLJCH8