Artisteer

[nar321]

[terrapin719]

[nar321]

I would really appreciate your going into more detail(prehaps in a private message) as to what you didn't like about it and if you care to your experience in this field(I realize you do custom twitter backgrounds, but don't know where on the scale that is compared to trying to change a header in Word Press)Maybe doing twitter backgrounds is more difficult, fill us in.

[tknoppe]

Very interesting. I'll download it and give it a try. I'm a web designer, so this is something I'm quite capable of doing on my own - BUT I teach others how to setup WP blogs, so I'm very interested in it from that standpoint.

I'll let ya know my thoughts after I've had a chance to play with it a bit.

[lisamariemary]

[tknoppe]

[wade_watson]

Artisteer looks like it would make WP theme editing pretty easy. It would certainly be worth looking into if you frequently set up WordPress sites for customers. After much struggle with WP, I came up with a way to edit themes that isn't too hard once you get used to it, but does require getting you hands dirty with code. If you know some HTML, you can assemble a WP page in the free Kompozer HTML editor. Kompozer has a nice little CSS editor that changes things real time as you tweak it. So using this method you can easily change a color scheme, fonts and sizes. You can also change the page layout, but that can get a bit more involved. I wrote a little article describing the method awhile back:



--Wade

[tknoppe]

I've bookmarked your article to read in more detail later Wade, but it looks good. Thanks!

[terrapin719]

I found Artisteer to be really limited. Of course that's from my perspective and I do know enough HTML to make my way around.

Although, maybe I just didn't play around with it enough. I found it to be easier to grab a free theme off the web, and Traci mentioned Artisteer could do a bit more .... I trial'd Artisteer when it was very, very new and they may have (hopefully) added some new better features since I did my trial.

[tknoppe]

I agree Loretta, it's limited. I can design my own templates from scratch; but I wasn't looking at it for me using it to design templates for web design clients, but as a tool I could introduce to some of my WordPress coaching clients. For some of them, it would be perfect. Or even folks who are a little html knowledge but not enough to do a whole template, or even if they do and just want to save themselves some time that Artisteer can save them by doing some of the work for them.

I liken Artisteer a bit like Dreamweaver. It's doing some of the coding for me, cutting down on what all I have to do. While it is much more limited overall - and not truly 'custom' in the end design, it certainly gives you lots of options. Still limited though - I agree. But for someone wanting their 'own' template, who doesn't want to pay a designer, this is good for them. I think there is a market for this - it just won't be for everyone.