Dan Harrison » Development

Why I use Artisteer for creating Wordpress Themes

Dan Harrison — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:00:43 +0000

Artiseer Startup Screen

This article is all about a template design tool called Artisteer. Artisteer is a essentially a design application that allows you to create your own great looking templates that can be used with Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress without needing any technical skills or needing to know how to use Photoshop or Dreamweaver.

When you’re creating lots of websites, coming up with unique designs all the time is hard work, particularly if you’re not artistic. Artisteer comes with loads of ready-made elements which you can blend together to create a great looking and unique theme. So for plenty more compelling reasons why its worth using Artisteer, keep reading!

The Suggest Design Feature

The most useful part of Artisteer is that you can ask the software to suggest ideas for you. When you first open the Artisteer application, you’ll be presented with an initial design. If you look at the toolbar, you’ll see a Suggest Design button. Each time you click the Suggest Design button, Artisteer will generate a completely unique design with a random layout, background, header, colour scheme, menu, and more.

The Ideas Toolbar

If you only want inspiration on just a single element, such as the header, then you just click on the Suggest Header, or Suggest Colour button to choose a random colour scheme. You can get a suggestion on virtually any part of the design just by clicking on one of the suggest buttons.

Initial Design

Random Header

Random Colour

Random Sheet, Header, Colour and Layout

Exporting Artisteer Designs

Once you’ve created your ideal design, you can export your template into a Wordpress theme, Joomla template, Drupal template, ASP.NET application, or CodeCharge Studio. You can also export your template into standard HTML.

For example, if you have Joomla and Wordpress running on the same website, where Joomla is the main website and Wordpress is used for the blog aspect, then you can get exactly the same look and feel on both websites without having to spend hours copying the template from one to the other.

Quick Design Tweaks

If you find you need to tweak an aspect of the design, such as the colour scheme, then it’s really quick to do so. You just adjust the colours in the scheme’s palette and apply the change to the whole design. Simple!

Making structural changes to a design, such as the column layout can easily consume lots of time. The advantage with Artisteer is that you can change the layout of the design within seconds. If you make a change and hate it, you can simply click the Undo button to revert the change. I find that Artisteer is great for experimenting with layout ideas without spending ages doing the HTML and CSS code to try it out.

Resale Rights

What’s really interesting about the Artisteer software is that you have resale rights on all the generated templates (except for the photos used as foreground images in the header). So you are free to distribute the templates as you wish, giving them away or charging money for them!

Just to clarify, you are allowed to use the foreground images on any of your own sites or sites you create for your customers and clients. The licensing on the images just means you can’t redistribute them.

Mac OS X Support

Currently the Artisteer software is supported on Microsoft Windows only. However, there’s already a mature beta of Artisteer for Mac OS X that exists, and any licence you purchase for the Windows version will be valid for the Mac version too. I expect that a supported release of the Mac OS X version will be available late 2009.

Conclusion

If you create lots of websites, then you’ll find Artisteer an affordable way to create lots of unique templates. Buying premium templates and themes can quickly add up to a lot of money. Artisteer costs just $49.95 for the basic version, and $129.95 for the standard version (the latter is what I use). That means a full licence of Artisteer costs between 1 to 3 times the cost of a one-off premium theme bought elsewhere.

So for an low cost and quick method of generated great looking templates, then do try Artisteer. Artisteer does have a free trial, where the final designs are watermarked. I strongly recommend you download it and have a play with it, even if you don’t end up buying it.

The links in this article to Artisteer are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission should anyone purchase Artisteer having clicked on one of the links in this article.

Disabling RSS Feeds in Wordpress

Dan Harrison — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:59:32 +0000

Sometimes, if you’re using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS), you don’t want to enable RSS feeds. For example, if you’re running a corporate website, an informational site, or any other kind of website that doesn’t need to have RSS, then its worth disabling RSS on your Wordpress site. After some digging around, I’ve found some tricks that allow you to disable RSS feeds.

I haven’t yet found a (non hacky) way to remove the RSS entry in the tags, but when I do, I’ll update this article.

Updating your template functions.php

In your template code, if you copy and paste the following code into the functions.php file, users will get a message saying that RSS feeds have been removed.

function disable_our_feeds() {
   wp_die( __('Error: No RSS Feed Available,
   Please visit our homepage.') );
}

add_action('do_feed', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);

Updating .htaccess

To stop users reaching the RSS page in the first place, you can redirect domain.com/feed back to domain.com using your apache .htaccess file.

# Remove RSS feed

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule feed(.*) http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/ [L]

Doing it with a plugin

The code changes above should only be done if you know what you’re doing. If you still want to disable RSS feeds, but you’re not that comfortable editing code, then I suggest using the Disable RSS plugin to do it.

How to get an affordable and unique logo design

Dan Harrison — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:00:55 +0000

When you launch a website or business, having a bold and representative logo can be a huge advantage. For example, can you imaging the logo for Pepsi, Virgin, MacDonalds, Apple, etc? Having such a strong logo helps people to remember your brand. If you have a logo that’s quirky, funny, or clever, then you’ve made it even easier to remember your logo.

Getting a professional logo designed can be expensive. Design agencies could charge you hundreds, if not thousands for a your logo. For medium or large companies, that’s great! However, for the rest of us with a small business, or even smaller website, premium prices for a logo are just not practical.

However, there’s a great way to get fresh and unique logos from just £30 to 50. I’ve used this technique to have logos such as the Big Eco Directory logo (above), and my consulting business logo Streamlined Thinking (below).

The technique is based on something called a logo contest. What you do is specify your requirements on a design contest forum, specify a prize amount (usually in US Dollars and paid via Paypal) and wait for the designs. To get the best results, you provide constructive feedback on each design that’s made. After a fixed time (around 3 to 5 days) you close the content, choose the winner, and then pay the artist for the best design.

The forum I currently use for logo contests is Digital Point, where I ran a $30 contest for The Big Eco Directory and a $50 contest for Streamlined Thinking. However, in order to run a contest, you do need to be an active contributor to the Digital Point forums, of which I am.

If you have a bit more money ($200 to $500), you can run a contest on 99 Designs which is a spinoff from another forum. However, you don’t need to be a regular contributor to start a contest at 99 Designs. The designs on 99 Designs are of a higher calibre (and more expensive), but the quality of logos from the Digital Point Contents Forum are perfectly good enough if your budget starts at $50.

If you do run your own logo contest at Digital Point, here are some tips:

Limit the contest to just 4 days
Offer feedback on every single design. Try to say what you do and don’t like on each design.
Offer around $50 to $100, as this attracts the better designers. Offer less than $50, and the better designers just don’t enter the contest.

If you want a professional logo designed, but you don’t want to become a member of Digital Point, then please contact me. For a fee of £10 GBP (plus the fee for the design), I’ll handle the running of the contest for you, including getting lots of feedback from you about the designs.

WP Portfolio Plugin V1.0 Released

Dan Harrison — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:00:37 +0000

After lots of work, I’ve publically released my first wordpress plugin called WP Portfolio, which is now available directly from the Wordpress Plugin Database.

The WP Portfolio plugin allows you to create a list of the websites you own or developed, which are then published on a page on your website. The plugin automatically generates thumbnails of each of your sites for you too. An example of the plugin in action is on my own portfolio page.

The WP portfolio plugin is ideal if you want to advertise all of the sites you work on, but where you don’t want to spend ages creating thumbnails. You have complete control over the HTML and CSS to render the thumbnails, but a default layout is provided to get you going. The thumbnails are generated using a free account on Shrink The Web.

Here’s summary of what you can do with the plugin:

Create a list of your websites with a name, URL and description
Group similar websites together, with a title and description for that group.
Automatically generate thumbnails in a small (120 x 90), large (200 x 150) or extra large size (320 x 240).
Adjust the number of days to cache the thumbnail on your site (to reduce load times)
Customise the HTML and CSS used to render the site and group fields.

Any feedback, suggestions and ideas are greatly welcomed.

Dan Harrison » Development

Why I use Artisteer for creating Wordpress Themes

The Suggest Design Feature

Exporting Artisteer Designs

Quick Design Tweaks

Resale Rights

Mac OS X Support

Conclusion

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