Huddled Masses

I recently came across a link to “Web Design Generator – Artisteer,” which I had never heard of before … I had a copy of it given to me, and I have to say that I’m really impressed!

Now, before you rush out and buy this, let’s be clear, because I don’t want to oversell this, or rather, to mis-represent it: Artisteer is not Blend. It is not FrontPage. It is not DreamWeaver. (It’s not trying to be). It’s a template generator, and it does a great job at that. Their website says:

• Design awesome Wordpress Blogs and professional Websites in Minutes
• No need to learn Photoshop, CSS, HTML or other technologies

• Export as Wordpress Theme

And it’s all true. I was able to create a slick WordPress template in just a few minutes, with really awesome integration of my own photos for the header with their watermarks and backgrounds and more, and creating custom buttons and header/menu gradients to match the link colors and all of that sort of stuff is literally as simple as selecting a color. Of course, I didn’t stop there. I spent hours playing around with all the settings and generating color-scheme after color scheme — it was actually fun, and I can’t say as I’ve ever had fun making a WordPress theme before .

Artisteer also has pre-created color schemes, font combinations, and header/etc. so even if your sense of style is worse than mine, you could make good-looking designs in just a few minutes. When you export them as WordPress templates they include full support for “widgets” and can be multiple columns, etc. When you export the WordPress template you can actually have them export it straight to a .zip file suitable for upload through the WordPress back-end, so there’s nothing to figure out. All for only $50, and for an extra $80, you get the additional ability to:

• Export templates for Joomla
• Export templates for Drupal
• Export templates for DotNetNuke (currently in beta)
• Export to a C# Asp.Net Visual Studio project (including templates for several pages and a site .master page)

• Export to CodeCharge Studio

There are one thing missing from this great app (which I hope can be added in a future release, now that I own a copy): there’s no support for flexible-width layouts. You can make your layout whatever width you like, but you can’t make it flexible to the browser width. It’s also a shame they don’t adopt Yahoo’s grid layouts — they have their own system, which works just as well, but obviously misses out the flexible-width option. Of course, if you know a little html/css you can (as I did for this theme) hack the box layout to match the YUI Grid layouts and get a flexible-width layout that way, and even add a few extra sidebars.

I do have a few nits to pick that are rather minor:

1. I was annoyed that I couldn’t set the borders on some of the boxes to show only a bottom border, or only a top border (I actually hacked a couple of them after publishing it to add -moz-rounded-borders and remove borders from a few edges).
2. I was frustrated while I was playing with it that it generated a bunch of links in the footer like “Contact us,” “Terms of Use,” and “Privacy Statement,” etc … without offering me anywhere in the app to edit either the list of links, or set an actual location for them to link to (they just link to “#”). Once I loaded the theme in WordPress I discovered they actually provided a setting in WordPress’ appearance settings where you can customize the footer, which is awesome, in that it makes the theme truly reusable, but a little heads up would have been nice, and saved me digging into the source to try to figure it out.

1. The export option for Asp.Net should support other languages (at least VB.Net), and should include a project file for people who are starting a new site. It also needs an MVC option — I’m in the middle of playing with trying to use a template I created with it on an AtomSite powered project, and what I’ve discovered is that Asp.Net templates require quite a bit of tweaking to become Asp.Net MVC templates.

Overall, awesome product, and very worthwhile if you create a lot of WordPress/Drupal/DotNetNuke/Joomla sites (as I do), and are tempted to splurge on for-pay themes to try to differentiate your sites (or your customer’s sites).

As a final note, I just saw on their new page that they have a beta available for Mac that runs on Mono, which might make it the first Mac OS app that has the fluent ribbon interface from Office 2007

Footnote

You may have noticed the links above are affiliate links. I think you can tell this article is just my usual opinionated review, but after I wrote it, I discovered that Artisteer has a referral program. So I signed up and I changed the links. I’m feeling ambivalent about that right now, so if you think it’s uncool of me to try and make a buck off a review, you can go straight to Artisteer.com and avoid giving me the credit, and then let me know in the comments that I shouldn’t do that anymore.

Incidentally, the referral company is LinkSynergy (LinkShare.com) and they are totally above-board. Since I’ve already used them on this page, and because it feels recursive and redundant, here’s a link to the LinkShare Referral Program too.

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