Archive for the ‘Blogs & Websites’ Category
Blog design with Artisteer
This blog uses WordPress, but since I wanted to create my own theme instead of using someone else’s, I needed a theme editor. (My choice was to either find a wysiwyg editor or learn CSS, which I didn’t have time for.) Luckily, I found Artisteer 2 which is $49.95 for home and academic use and $129.95 standard edition. There is a free trial version and I urge you to try it first before you purchase it, since there’s no refund.
Artisteer not only generates WordPress themes, it can generate Joomla templates, Drupal themes, DotNetNuke skins, and Blogger templates. Artisteer software has a clean interface (it actually reminded me of Word 2007) and it was simple to choose one of their blog themes and then edit it extensively to get pretty much the look I wanted. I was able to add different fonts, although it includes dozens. Artisteer can customize almost everything in the themes by color, font, size and more. One drawback: it comes with a limited amount of clipart images for use in the header, but you can also use your own.
Artisteer is a fairly inexpensive option when compared to other products out there, like Dreamweaver ($399 for new users) or Adobe Contribute CS4 at around $199 for a new license. If you already own Dreamweaver, you can download a free extension called ThemeDreamer, which allows WYSIWYG editing of WordPress. There are also other WYSIWIG editors, such as Microsoft SharePoint Designer.
