Reviews Software & AppsReview - Artisteer Template Generator

Review - Artisteer Template Generator

Written by Marc Roberge | 13 January 2010

So you’ve been thinking about putting up a website? One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make is what type of site you need. Will static HTML pages serve your purpose or will you be needing to update content regularly? Will you want to be able to accept user registrations and interact dynamically with your visitors or clients, host a forum, blog, or serve files?

Chances are, if you are leaning towards the latter, you are probably looking for a robust, extensible, and likely free CMS (Content Management System) like Joomla or Drupal or perhaps a Wordpress blog.

Welcome to the club! Of course, one thing that often deters people from trying a CMS is the steep learning curve, especially when it come to editing PHP and CSS files in order to get your site to look attractive and professional. While there are quite a few free templates available for consumption for the CMS platforms mentioned and more, these are generally tricky to customize. I’ve seen myself spend days tweaking PHP, CSS, HTML and image files to get a site looking halfway decent and not like it was made from a template visitors have likely seen on hundreds of sites already.

About a month ago, I stumbled onto Artisteer! What a life saver! With a few simple clicks, you can generate a fully customized template for your Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke or Blogger site.

When you launch this little wonder, you are greeted by this screen. Just pick your CMS flavor – and you are off to the races.

The interface is simple and intuitive. Artisteer loads up a base template for you to customize.

If you want Artisteer to offer design suggestions, simply click the “Suggest Design” button until it calls up a layout or scheme you like.

When you hit a basic design you like, you are free to customize every single aspect of your template, such as: color themes, fonts, typography, layout, width, module columns, background, header, menu, article look, buttons, footers and more. At each step, you can use the suggestion button or tweak to your heart’s content. Insert your own graphics, photos and other custom touches. Here are a few screenshots…

Artisteer includes a host of stock images, textures and icons which are free to use. With unlimited options – you will never find a duplicate site anywhere.

Within 10 minutes, you can have a professional looking template for your site. That’s how long it took for me to create the basic template for this very site. Yes! Dodisdodat.com is built on an Artisteer template.

Artisteer is perfect for:

· the individual or business who needs one unique or custom template. Compared to the price of paying a designer/programmer for a scratch built site or for customizing an existing template. $49.99 for a Wordpress or Blogger template or $129.99 for a Joomla, Drupal or DotNetNuke is extremely cheap. You’ll pay more than that for some premium templates that you will still need to have customized.

· the individual or business that runs several websites. You can generate unique templates for each or use your template across all your sites.

· the individual or business who wants to create and sell templates or offer site design services. Artisteer will give you quality templates every time without the hassle of delving deep into the code.

Save yourself a lot of time, aggravation and money. Do yourself a favor and try it out! Try the evaluation or buy yours here: