Why I use Artisteer for creating Wordpress Themes
July 23rd, 2009 | Author: Dan Harrison
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.
Posted in Development | 
Tags: Artisteer, popular, template design, web design, wordpress theme design, wordpress themes
Great bit of software and a great write up Dan. For someone like me with zero artisic talent I need all the help I can get. I’ll have a go with the free trial and see how I get on with it. I’m looking to design a new header for my loft conversions website and artisteer looks a lot easier than doing it with GIMP.
Thanks John. Yeah, headers are much easier to do with Artisteer. If you want a glowly graphic in the header, you need to create a transparent PNG and then you can add it as a local file within Artisteer.
Dan
Thanks for the tip Dan.
Hi John
I tried Artiseer yesterday and was wowed by the simplicity of the program and what I could achieve. I designed a new website in a couple of hours – tweeking and messing about with colours and looks.
My only problem was I wanted to use it for my blogger site and currently they do not support this.
I emailed and they responded very quickly to say that they are working on it currently, but have problems with the images side of things.
I can’t wait for them to release this !
I have been wanting to customise my own site for a long time but just don’t really want to get into the ‘learning codes’ – too old now ! Ha ! So this is perfect for me !
I will just have to sit tight and be patient (not a thing a woman can do easily!)
Thanks for your great write up that inspired me to look at Artiseer !
Artisteer really do listen to their users. The mac version of Artisteer has recently been released, which was essentially a feature request. So the blogger feature will arrive in the near future!
Dan
In answer to the comment above – their latest version now supports blogger blogs as well.
Question Dan – how do you add the streamlined thinking box at the end of the post ? Have you just hacked the single .php file – I know you can’t do it native inside Artisteer
Hi Lissie
I’m a web developer, so I know my way around code. I essentially copied the block of code used to surround a post, and then added my own content to it.
Dan
Hi Lissie – thanks for the comment advising they now support blogger blogs ! I’m off to update my trial version ‘post haste’ !
Julie
Cheers Dan, having seen your article and tried out the trial I was significantly impressed!
I used your link so hopefully the commission will be coming your way!
Thanks Jon, much appreciated!
Dan
Hi Dan
I used your link also, so I hope once I decide which one to use and purchase the commission will come your way too!
Your advise has been very helpful
Also Dan, which version would you recommend for me? I want to build my own blogger site and possibly do for others, but not on a huge scale. MAybe just to make the software pay for itself.
I also want to be able to add a few bits once the main design is done. Is this relatively easy?
Thanks again for all your advice
Regards
Julie
Hi Julie
Thank you!
If you’re dong 2-3 website templates, then I’d recommend going for the cheaper version. It has around 66% of the design ideas compared to the pro version, but its $80 cheaper!
Adding bits yourself is pretty simple. I recommend learning some basic CSS/HTML. There are plenty of tutorials, but you’ll find that you’ll get quite far with customising then.
Thanks
Dan