Yesterday I stumbled across a Google Advert (funnily enough, on my own website) advertising a Windows-only program called Artisteer, made by Extensoft. It’s a WordPress theme creator that promises no-fuss, no-muss theme creation, and after downloading the demo and playing with it on my Windows XP laptop for about 30 minutes, I have to agree wholeheartedly that it delivers.
Usually I don’t bother with Windows software, but for this I bought a licence (the standard edition, less than 50 bucks, suited me just fine) and downloaded it to my laptop, which is XP.
I dug up a vacation shot of our turkish holidays, and selected it. It immediately showed me a preview. The title was in the center and clashed. Click and then drag’n change the title, solved. Then I made the page a 1000 pixels wide by clicking and selecting an option. Then I set the color scheme, the gradients, the buttons, the shadow on the buttons, the gradient background, the shadow on the page, changed the layout to a 3-column theme, set the search bar on top and it all came down to selecting a tab in the menu bar and selecting the relevant option.
The simplicity of theme creation that Artisteer offers is really astonishing – at last anybody can whip up a theme without knowing all the php code, without having to search through reams of code to change just that line. So far I have not encountered any bugs, the application is really well made, and the pdf help file was helpful for as much that I needed it.
Future expansions seem to be aimed on providing theme exports for Joomla and Drupal.
All in all, this is one piece of software I can recommend !
