I purchased a software program called Artisteer. For those that have never heard of Artisteer, and I didn’t until recently, it is a Web design editor. With it you can create WordPress Blogs, Joomla and Drupal templates and plain html. There are two editions, Home and Standard. I went with the home edition because of the cost savings. With the home edition costing $49.95 and the standard edition costing $129.95. A savings of $80.00. The home edition doesn’t do everything I would like it to but I know enough to manually tweak the template when I am done. The issues I have with the home edition are
1. You are not allowed to make the background a static , non-scrolling, background. This can be changed through the dashboard editor of your wordpress theme but I think not to include this function in this version is really just silly. And perhaps just a little greedy. Would this feature be worth the extra $80.00? No way.
2. You are limited to the size of your sheet layout. A maximum size of 1000px and a maximum size of 20% for each of the sidebars, I think for a max of two sidebars. I don’t know if the maximum sheet size can be changed in the dashboard editor or not. My guess is that it can but I haven’t really needed to change this since 1000px has worked fine for me so far. Keeping in mind that I don’t design professionally and only design my sites to flip them at auction.
3. The home edition only saves the templates as .html and WordPress. In order to save for Joomla and Drupal you have to invest in the standard edition. This really is not an issue for me since I don’t know anything about Joomla or Drupal. If I thought I was going to need this ability then I would say the upgrade would be worth the extra money.
Do I think that software was worth the money? Yes, I do. It doesn’t do everything I would like and it certainly isn’t a perfect piece of software but it does what I need and the learning curve isn’t that steep for simple WordPress themes. It should go without saying that the longer you use the software the more complex of designs you would be able to design. Having the software for less than one week I have already designed and posted three WordPress blogs. The thing to do would be to design about 6 generic templates and keep them on file. Or maybe even give as a free download with your link designed in the templates. And they do offer a “download free trial”. It can create the same exact theme as the paid edition but the trail software is watermarked and unusable when uploaded as a theme to your WordPress blog. So I would suggest that you download the ” free trial ” and see if Artisteer is what you need to solve your design problems.
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