I’ve been writing about the creation of my WordPress starter theme, ‘Oystershell’, that I used as the base for the development of the theme for this website and how I used a range of other starter themes and code bases as inspiration. One of the decisions I made was to include the code for making CSS buttons from Twitter Bootstrap.

Twitter Bootstrap is a “sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development” provided by Twitter. It has a range of components providing different user interface elements that used together can help you build a website in the style of the Twitter website.

I really like Bootstrap. The elements are well designed and stylish. But I didn’t want to include the whole of it in my starter theme. I wanted to pick and choose from the elements and happily the Bootstrap website includes a feature that allows you to customise your download so you only get the bits of code you want.

The component I thought would be most useful to include in my starter theme was the Bootstrap style buttons. You can see some examples of these here:

With CSS from Bootstrap added to my starter theme’s CSS I only need to add a simple class declaration to a <button> or <a> tag to turn it into a snazzy button.

• More about the buttons included in Twitter Bootstrap
• Twitter Bootstrap Button Generator: A useful tool for defining Bootstrap buttons when writing HTML