Why I use Artisteer for creating WordPress Themes

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, 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.