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).

This new email marketing tool is Open Source (as usual) built using PHP and MYSQL. We have employed some fairly simple yet effective Ajax and Javascript functionality to generate the informational overlay pop-ups and generate the dynamic email builder preview. Now we just hope that it helps all those RacingPost.com customers get the gift they want for Christmas… instead of one they don’t!

The site sits on a PHP/MYSQL based Content Management System (CMS) powered by Hungarian web development company Pressflex. The folks at Pressflex have been super efficient and managed to tweak our HTML to fit their needs for all browsers (including the dreaded IE6). We like their CMS, it works very nicely indeed for publishers and enables traditional print-based publishers to upload XML files for each printed issue whilst also editing and tagging the content themselves.

A professional developer has to test multiple browser platforms with each new Website build and create CSS work-arounds to fit the whole gamut of versions, this ensures that a consistent screen display occurs for the majority of people. For the website funder / customer this means more time spent and consequently a more costly development. One could argue that the BBC headline may as well be ‘Microsoft to make Web development more expensive until 2014’.

Given the recent Twitter hashtag popularity on ‘IE6 Must Die’ we would have hoped that Microsoft might have paid attention to the Web developer community! However, as they appear to have done quite the opposite we shall continue to test multiple browser versions via a single PC on an IE6 simulator. This isn’t particularly straight-forward until you look into it and discover Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2004 download and associated ‘VPC images’:

1. Download Virtual PC 2004

2. Download a suitable Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image
Here there are many VPC images for IE6, 7 and 8 on XP SP3 and they provide the only really stable and well supported browser testing environment that we can find. The VPC images currently expire on 31st August 2009 so here’s hoping that with the new IE6 support announcement new VPC Images will be loaded in the next few weeks! September update: new VPC images expire January 1, 2010 – PHEW!