I discovered a very handy tool for creating Wordpress themes recently which goes by the name of Artisteer. I’m always a bit pessimistic about using any kind of  WYSIWYG editing tool to create website code, experience has taught me that such programmes are not without their bugs or coding inaccuracies, and their lack of flexibility usually stifles creativity. For example, I had a total nightmare today with the movie maker at xtranormal.com – it kept crashing and I lost two hours of work. However, I can’t really say a bad word about Artisteer, having worked on a Wordpress development project for more than five hours now (including first time user training) I am officially in love with it!

As well as Wordpress themes, Artisteer can produce themes for Joomla and Drupal, but of course it can’t do everything, if you have any specific creative imagery in mind then you need to start with a decent header layout, and import that into Artisteer. There’s also a need to crop and edit your own png files with varying degress of transparency if you want to use custom icons. Once imported though the ’suggestion’ buttons work across the whole theme or against individual components (headers, footers, menus, columns) to revolve multiple colour scheme and format suggestions.  This makes the decision making process of Wordpress theme design so much faster than hand coding style sheet amends of hexidecimals and processing hundreds of FTP uploads and browser refreshes.

Having now successfully completed a theme, exported and imported it without any issues and populated it with content on a Wordpress installation, I can safely say that it is well worth the cost of the Artisteer ctivation code (approximately £85 I think for the Standard edition). I will certainly be making more use of this great application in future and spending less time tinkering with the templates at woothemes.com (although those really are first rate theme designs – it’s where I got the Firetop theme from).

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