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Design your own WordPress, Joomla and Drupal Themes with Artisteer 2 – Standard Version

While searching the web for information about creating my own  WordPress themes, I saw an advertisement for an application called Artisteer by Extensoft. Artisteer is a nifty app that allows anyone to generate their own personalized WordPress, Joomla and Drupal themes, without any HTML or CSS  knowledge. When it comes to website design, I know nothing. I rely upon the talent of the WordPress community that provide free WordPress themes. With Artisteer I can design my own themes, and I’m extremely impressed with how easy it was for me to generate my first unique WordPress theme.  

Within minutes of downloading the Artisteer Demo, I designed a brand new WordPress theme. Artisteer comes with many font styles, button styles, headers and choice of colors for easy design. You can use your own header images if you want to customize even further. I have designed two WP themes so far, with many more planned.

Artisteer’s interface is neat, straight forward and easy to comprehend. By default, the software opens up to the “ideas” tab, which gives you the option of having the software generate an automated design for you, by clicking the “suggest design” tab, or let you pick and choose your own colors, fonts, blocks and buttons. I chose to do it myself to see how the themes would look. I’ve been downloading free WP themes for months and always have to tweak something to bring the theme closer to my liking. Not with Artisteer. Now I can truly design WordPress themes to suit my taste.  

I have included a couple of Artisteer screenshots below. The first screenshot is what you will see each time you launch Artisteer. This is where you choose whether to create a WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal theme, or a basic HTML Template . The second screenshot is of Artisteers toolbar, and the third screenshot shows a theme chosen by Artisteer by default.

Getting Started With Artister

Artisteer Toolbar

Artisteer Default Theme

Artisteer will always have one default theme for you to start with. You don’t have to start from scratch, instead you just use the existing theme to make your desired changes. The first things I did was change the header so that it was shorter and wider and I moved the sidebar from the right side to the left side of the page.

My favorite feature so far is the instant-preview feature. Many of the features involve drop down menu’s that allow you to simply hover your mouse over any option in that drop down menu, and you see the changes applied instantly. If you like what you see, you can make the change permanent. If you move your mouse away from the drop down menu, the preview reverts back to its current point.

You can design as many themes as you want. The number of themes you can create, is limited only to your imagination. Once you have designed your first theme with Artisteer, you will be hooked. You can use a single theme and simply swap header images, change sidebar and menu position, change background color/image, change button styles and more. So far I have only used Artisteer suggested header images, but I shall add my own header images soon.

I really like this application and I expect it to get even better every few months. I’m still a relatively new blogger, but I wish Artisteer was around a year ago. I would have saved a lot of wasted time trying to find good WordPress themes. A year into blogging and I was still searching, but, this time I found the answer. Artisteer.

At the time of this writing Artisteer is only available for Windows, but according to their FAQ section they are working on a beta version for Mac and Linux, currently scheduled for July 2009. Extensoft does not promise retail releases for Mac and Linux, but the fact that they’re willing to give Mac and Linux users a chance to test the software is a good sign.

This software is sold in two versions. The first is the Home/Student version, the second is the more feature-rich, Standard Version. The Home and Student version is only for WordPress themes, the standard version is for WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. I purchased the standard version so that I can tinker with Joomla! and Drupal at a later time.

Follow this link to design your own WordPress, Joomla and Drupal Themes with Artisteer 2 – Standard Version.