We all work very hard to cater the best possible design and user experience for the website’s client centric views. What about the administration panel?
There is very less importance given to the admin panels. If you exclude the CMS frameworks like WordPress which has a decent administration view out of the box then you may not find anything interesting with admin panel on the majority of the websites.
We all know that the engagement, conversion, and money will be flowing through the client-centric website design.
And we know that the admin panels are going to be used by either the sole website owner or the in-house I.T team.
Apparently, there is no meaning investing much of the resources on the administration panel which going to be used by you or your employee right?
Well, that’s not really the case. I have two things to say here. One a better administration design would help you improve the workflow if it is going to be used by you or your team.
The second point, there are certain applications which have sole administrative purpose only with the specific set of users and roles.
In such cases, these templates help you save much of your designing time and help you concentrate on your programming part.
Being responsive in nature these templates work seamlessly on the majority of the mobile devices. And it helps you save the effort and cost of native mobile app development.
No matter which web programming language you are going to use or what web server infrastructure you will have. It will work just fine in all the cases.
One more thing is that there are many admin templates that look good with provided demo data. But they look all different when you remove some elements and add your own data to it.
I have tried my best to pick those free admin templates which would still look good even after you add/delete some UI element and add your custom data on it.
So let’s start exploring our top five bootstraps based admin template now.
Table of Contents
1 Gentellela:
This is the MIT license based open source and GitHub hosted the project that you can use freely. You can even add your own changes to make it more customized based on your requirement.
This is Bootstrap 3 based responsive admin template. The template uses some of the third party jQuery plugins and tools to make a powerful admin template.
What you see here with the template is what you actually get. The template contains many libraries like charts, maps, wizard, calendar, date range, upload control, weather, and much more.
If you are interested knowing more about this project or you would like to contribute your efforts for this template. Consider visiting the gentle Lela’s GitHub project.
2 AdminLTE:
This is again an open source GitHub hosted project. It is free to use bootstrap based admin template. It packs all the goodies that you may need with an admin template.
This is simply one of my personal favorites. I have used this template in many of my projects as a web administration panel for projects.
Here are some of the cool features of this template:
- Built using HTML5 CSS3
- 1000+ icons available
- Six skins included
- Printing friendly design
- Supports majority of the browser
If you are not sure about which template you should go with. You should at least try this one.
It is a well-documented template. You can make easy edits to cast template according to your requirements.
All the necessary libraries and plugins included with the template. Download it and start using it.
3 AdminBSB:
Are you a material design fab? Well, this free and open source admin template is for you!
It is one of the minimalistic, colorful, flat, and beautiful looking admin templates you can use for any of your projects.
It does support the wide variety of browsers. And it’s built on top of Bootstrap framework which makes it compatible with the vast majority of the devices and screen sizes.
The template includes all the required plugins and libraries to offer various functionality and UI elements that see on template snapshot.
You get the calendar, date picker, tables, various widgets, forms, charts and many more elements to make this template completely yours.
It’s a GitHub hosted open source project. You can contribute your work for this template. It also has a documentation which will help you understand the template files and structure.
4 Metis:
Are you a fan of dark admin template? Well, maybe this free admin template would be a good pick for you.
You may find this template a bit dated, but the author claims that the template will soon get the major overhaul and will be rewritten with Bootstrap 4!
If that happens, this would be one of the earliest templates that will be utilizing the Bootstrap 4 framework along with other advantages.
The template comes with all standard set of plugins, tools, and libraries to make it usable for any admin projects.
Make sure you check the official repo to know about their Bootstrap 4 release. I hope they would bring some cool new features as well.
5 Minimum Admin Theme:
This free open source template is for your if you are looking for minimal, animated, material design and bootstrap 3 based admin template.
The template comes with two distinct version of the dashboard to choose from. You can also customize it to fit your needs.
Almost all the templates you get the wide variety of animation with this template out of the box. It is very useful if you are making a flat and funky looking admin panel. You can always disable that animation if doesn’t like them.
Like every other template, you get all the standard UI elements like calendar, charts, badges, forms, input boxes, the set of animated radio and checkboxes and much more.
You can fork the repository and create something new out of it. If you prefer adding something valuable to this template you can contribute the original GitHub repository.
Conclusion:
If you haven’t concentrated much on the admin design template or you don’t want to invest your efforts on admin template. Here are the five best free hand picked admin templates you can use right now. All the templates are open source and hosted on Github.
Author Bio:
Darshan is the founder of AlphansoTech a web application development company. He loves to share his experiences and helpful information with the community. You can connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn if you find this post any helpful.
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