Artisteer WordPress Theme Creator Review
If you’re like me – a writer with only rudimentary amounts of Web design experience – then you’ve already embraced WordPress with open arms. And, if you’re still like me, there is an aspect of WordPress that gets on your nerves – it is, after all, a dang web platform! Arg, web design is hard!
In the past, I’ve outsourced my Web design, which seems to have worked out pretty well, considering I’ve never needed to build a new WordPress design again. But if the Artisteer WordPress theme creator does what it says it will do, I might never need to outsource again. In fact, if Artisteer works, maybe people can pay me to do their design.
After feeling my way around the Artisteer software and testing it out, I’ve taken a few screen shots and made this summary for you.
Above: This is the first thing I saw - before doing anything - while using this software. Not a bad beginning template.
Artisteer starts you out with a nice little beginning template – nothing too fancy, but nothing too WordPress 1.0 either – and the menu is pretty simple. I click through some of the buttons like “Suggest Header” and the heading background suddenly turns into random pictures of skylines and a guy playing a guitar.
A nice feature that’s easy to use is the “header” and “column” section of the software, which allows you to easily move around your menus and your columns. For some reason, I never am quite happy with the columns I get in my blogs, so this is a big one for me.
You can make both “thin” and “thick” columns just by selecting the basic layout from a menu. I found the options pretty much gave you what you might want – honestly, how many ways are there to build columns, really?
Before long, I find myself fiddling with all of the features of the design – sheet width, background gradient, color themes. Artisteer has a pretty intuitive menu and features outline that makes it easy to understand, even for a novice like me.
After using their "suggest" features, I hypothesize what a "Leaning on Balls" blog would look like and type in the appropriate headline, as you see highlighted. You can, of course, upload your own images.
After choosing a color scheme and basic template, the rest of your design decisions will be affected by it. When you click to edit your button colors, for example, they’ll give you options that fit in the range of the color scheme you’ve already chosen. This takes the “duh” factor out of choosing your colors and making yourself look like a bad designer because you didn’t pay enough attention to the individual colors you were using.
Also, at every feature, you’ll find a “suggest” button that will do the work for you. You just keep clicking “suggest” and Artisteer toggles through different colors, schemes, layouts, and headers. Do you think I could come up with a blog about leaning on balls without some help from technology? Please.
Though the menu is simple enough, if you want to get into more detail about your blog, you simply click a little arrow in the lower-right section of the part of the menu you’d like to expand. This sounds like something that could use a visual aid.
The initial use is simple, but you can easily access more options by clicking the arrows.
If you really want to mess with your WordPress blog, you’re going to have to make the big decisions first. The big decisions include the color scheme, header, and general layout of the thing. You can swap where you put your menu (I, in the above pictures, opt for the “above-header” position) and add an extra column.
The Artisteer is pretty fun – particularly if you let it design itself and click “suggest” at every turn, when you truly come up with some strange combinations. But there are some downsides to the software, as well. Here are my overall impressions of the positive and negative aspects of Artisteer:
Positives
- Easy-to-use: Unless you’re one of the people who doesn’t “get computers,” if you’ve used Facebook, there’s a good chance you can use Artisteer. It might take a little support if you’re not sure how to export your theme into an actual WordPress blog, but Artisteer seems to make that process as simple as possible.
- Attention to detail: If you like the basic two-column design of most blogs, you’ll find this software will easily let you customize a large range of details and broad-spectrum ideas.
- Professional-looking: It’s very easy to come up with a professional-looking site that is unique to your individual blog. Once you make decisions on the big things, the software will then build the rest of your options around those early decisions, making the design flow naturally.
Negatives
- Opportunity for creativity: Where is it? Though the software does a good job of allowing you to control a lot of details about your blog, there’s really no space left for outside-the-box design or adding some really freaky widgets. That’s fine if you don’t mind a basic template to serve your utilitarian blog, but the designers looking to push the envelope may not be able to here.
As you can see, the positives generally outweigh the negatives. I definitely can say I’d recommend Artisteer to someone who was looking to create their own WordPress blog theme, particularly those friends of mine who have no experience publishing much of anything online. You’ll quickly, easily, be able to pick up on how it works and be able to create something that looks better than the Blogger templates you’ll find.
For those with more advanced tastes, I can’t say that I have much for you. Of course, you don’t exactly need a program like this, do you?
Check out Artisteer at: www.artisteer.com
Disclosure: Clickfire received a working copy of the Artisteer software from the company in order to test and perform this review.
January 19th, 2009
Artisteer sounds like a cool program to use. Great article. I’m glad you summed up the pos. and neg. it gives me a clear understanding of what to expect from the program.
January 22nd, 2009
Thanks for this information. I should try the trial version. From the screenshot, it looks that this software is really good.
January 23rd, 2009
Looks cool. I’m never happy with most templates out there and am always tempted to pay someone to create a unique one for me. I think I’m going to try this out.
Thnx
February 14th, 2009
This tool is marvelous, I’ve just bought a copy. I’m a pretty good webworker (HTML, CSS, PHP …), but a bad designer. This programe is easy to use and does a great design job. It generates standard-compliant WordPress templates and if I want I can still fiddle with the HTML-, CSS- and PHP-code … afterwards.
You need to check out version 2 (still beta). It even allows you to generate templates for Joomla or Drupal!
So far I haven’t seen anything like it on the market.
Thank you
Johann
March 16th, 2009
The software is very good for decent graphics design but once you get beyond the basic template, one still has to figure out a lot of code to customize some very basic things.
It does eliminate a lot of time in putting together the look of your blog, but then if you want to customize the look further, you have to figure out how they are using their code. Good how to use graphics documentation in the manual, pretty lousy documentation on the code they use.
Lacks some functionality in very basic look and feel stuff. If you just want to use a very basic blog, this will do a decent job for you and is worth the price. But if you want to begin to customize and add plug-ins, there are some big holes that could be filled.
Thumbs up if you want basic functionality with very sweet graphics. Thumbs down if you want to tweak and customize your blog and add additional functionality.
March 29th, 2009
That may be the best and most objective review I have read thus far. The lack of customization is being worked on with peer to peer user groups and forums like ours that allow users to share hints, tips, idea and fixes that help overcome some of the limitations of the software. Thanks for the great review!
April 3rd, 2009
I agree that it’s pretty amazing for what it does, though it does have certain design limitations. However, given the price, that’s to be expected.
My problem with it is that the new version seems to be buggy – keeps crashing when I use the color selector. I’ve reported this to Artisteer, but they haven’t responded. That makes me hesitant to get too dependent on their software.
April 4th, 2009
i just love this little program! i hate spending hours and hours to find that one theme, and after that spending more to adapt it. and it is only 39 euro!
Are there similar apps on the market?
April 14th, 2009
I purchased Artisteer and have not been able to customize wordpress themes with additional plug-ins. Whenever you add them the site crashes. I thought something was wrong with the program. Artisteer’s response: it wasn’t designed to be able to do that.
April 14th, 2009
diane, I am not sure I follow what you mean by customizing wordpress themes with additional plugins. I installed a theme that I made several months ago and didn’t have any trouble with plugins. Care to elaborate?
May 8th, 2009
A very well put together review of a great piece of software. I have created a couple of templates and I have had no issues.
I like to design stuff but it would normally take me for ever to come up with just an idea. So Artisteer has helped me save a lot of time.
June 20th, 2009
Artisteer is amazing. You can instantly create a wide variety of themes for a many different types of website. Glares, gradients, photos, textures, images, and many more types of media are built in to the software.
It also lets you add your own images.
I would highly recommend the software.
If you would like to see an example of what artisteer can do for you please go to my website, which was themed by this amazing software
June 25th, 2009
I was playing around the the demo the other day and there are a few things I’d like to tack on:
I too was worried about the widgets, I want to put videos on the site. So i emailed them and they said that its just the “theme”, you actually add all the content and fun stuff in the platform or whatever.
Also, I personally thought it resembled the new Microsoft Office programs! Dont you think? So basically, anyone who can use excel or word or powerpoint could easily figure this out!!
Now, I’ve never created a website but im looking into it… soo hopefully im right about the widget thing… i havent bought it yet though
July 21st, 2009
Please see this discussion and this comment at drupal.org
(http://drupal.org/node/402772#comment-1835124)
July 22nd, 2009
Yeah, I use also artisteer and it is great, I can make money by creating/designing themes. Thanks to artisteer.. :)
August 4th, 2009
I have used this software to create templates, in Joomla! specifically, and their implementation of z-index in the template caused numerous display issues in Firefox 3.x and IE 6, 7, & 8 when rendering JScook, and Mootools elements.
There still is no substitute to hand-coding your design, if you want interoperability, accessibility and SE friendliness.
I appreciate your point of view as a non-technical person who needs some look-pretty for your site, but Artisteer aint pretty, it just looks that way. It is good, but not good enough.
August 6th, 2009
great, sounds like a good place to start making blogs. i have no experience yet of doing so, so i think i might pick this one up first! thanks for the post!
October 2nd, 2009
I’ve been testing out the demo and find it very useful and easy to work with. You can’t customize everything, but it does let you work with about 90% of the theme. Adding custom graphics to footers for example seems to be something you would need to do by hand. However, you can easily change the colors, size and graphics of a theme in just a few minutes. It’s a little pricey but the program seems worth it if you have few blogs you want to work with.
October 30th, 2009
I want to thank you for this informative article. I have been battling to create a good looking template for my website and I will try the trial version and see how simple it is.
Once again thanks for the article
November 9th, 2009
I am a newbie and couldn’t be happier. Thanks for the post after a few minutes on the trial I new i needed this program.
January 6th, 2010
Thesis theme is a better option.
January 13th, 2010
It was great discover for me and I used it for majority of my sites since. Not for all because the look of site designed with Artisteer can be spoted quickly. There should be more variety of layout design.
This is also one of few things on my wish list besides more menu options, modules in header position (especially search module).
I think Artisteer has great potential, look forward to next versions.
February 7th, 2010
Artisteer is a good program for those wanting something ‘different’ in their theme that they can’t seem to find anywhere else as well as those seeking to create their own ‘look’. It’s an easy to grasp program with intuitive suggestions and options like Emory reported above.
I’ve been using it on and off for a year now and have been satisfied with the results myself. My take on it is that professionals create options galore with their templates and custom coding whereas, Artisteer allows it’s owner to create unique templates that they can customize to suit their tastes.
I’ve only used mine for creating WordPress themes and some HTML templates and have had a good bit of success with it. However, I still find myself going back to others from time to time. Guess it’s all in how well satisfied one is with the end result.
Overall, it’s a good program for the novice to intermediate designer that will net them good results.
February 7th, 2010
Oh, and by the way, those who complain about the IE6 browsers still being used? Forget about them. Between the security risks and incompatibility issues, they’ll be forced to upgrade in the near future.
February 7th, 2010
I tend to agree with your assessment, Scott. Taken for what it is, Artisteer gives you a way to quickly put together a decent looking theme with basic features and without spending a large sum of cash.
February 20th, 2010
The program is in many ways better than Thesis or Headway, which I’ve used, but it doesn’t let you add or edit Content, which is what blogging is about. Is there a way to drop text, links,images or video into sidebars, headers or blogs?
February 22nd, 2010
It is not supposed to be to enter content but to create a template. You add a content later within a selected CMS like WordPress.
April 14th, 2010
Thanks for the heads up, I am looking for something like this. I’m glad you made the point about it not being creative. I’ve looked at some other theme designers and they are the same boxy, standard, classic, boring styles.
However, I think this is a beginning, these tools will get better.
The biggest contender though is the new themes which have dynamic style sheets like Flexibility2 and the superb Atahualpa. The latter one of these themes has amazing tweakability (my new word) and once you get over the shock of the options available it’s actually very good.
Personally, I want a desktop theme designer which delivers for someone with some programming experience without being a professional.
April 19th, 2010
I bought Artisteer and yes it is perfect for creating a custom looking blog for those with limited php. css experience. I have also used Thesis- and while Thesis is nice. It’s hard to customize a design without knowing some CSS. You basically end up with a naked looking webpage. Though I am starting to see lots of “Thesis skins” for sale now. I still cant tweak design with Thesis like I can with Artisteer. Just my two cents :)
May 28th, 2010
I bought the standard version (not the home version) of Artisteer and whilst I initially had a lot of fun with it, it’s limitations soon began to surface. In order to get anything other than the very standard look and feel of these generated templates, you need to dig into the code/CSS. If you are going to be doing that anyway you may as well consider the amazing (and free) Atahualpa theme which has much greater flexibility.
June 6th, 2010
I use this software for building my simple site…