I became a self employed system administrator in 2011 and (touch wood) my freelance infrastructure business has been going fairly well so far. I thought it was about time I built a marketing website for my business, and I wanted to create a simple, professional-looking site without having to spend too much time building it.
After some research I ended up using the excellent Initializr to produce a template website built from HTML5 Boilerplate (H5BP) and Twitter Bootstrap. H5BP provides a solid HTML5 core with optimisations for JavaScript, CSS, Apache, Google Analytics, etc., and Twitter Bootstrap provides a simple but very powerful HTML/CSS layout framework which cleverly handles things like rendering on mobile devices so that you don’t have to worry about it.
It was very easy to modify the template and build the simple marketing website I wanted. The end result isn’t the most advanced design ever created, and it’s instantly recognisable as a Bootstrap site to anyone else who’s used it, but that’s OK. I’m just trying to market my business, not win design awards. I’d certainly recommend Initializr to anyone else who understands HTML and CSS and wants to get a decent site up and running as quickly as possible.
The end result can be seen at mattbrock.co.uk.