I’ve been a long-time Artisteer user. I bought it many versions ago and was really excited with the prospect of designing my own WordPress and Joomla themes and templates, respectively.
Then, for some reason I became enamoured with pre-designed themes and shelved Artisteer. I’d bust it out once in a while to play with it, but the widget placement limitations simply didn’t inspire me.
Then I discovered Artisteer released version 3.0 and I took a look. Unfortunately my 12 months of free upgrades had expired, so I had to pay an upgrade charge. That was okay because I really wanted to try the upgraded version.
Frankly, Artisteer 3.0 is excellent. There are some great enhancements such as:
Beefed up image library. I’m talking about a lot more images, backgrounds, textures, etc. to use. This alone was worth the upgrade. If you’re into building HTML websites, you’ll love Artisteer. You can actually insert your content in Artisteer and crank out new web pages like it’s no tomorrow. It’s Dreamweaver on steroids. It’s fast and the amount of customization you can do is astonishing. Free templates to use: Artisteer now offers full website templates (and WordPress themes) you can load into Artisteer and tweak. Some of the designs are stunning and make creating a professional website fast and easy.
But, what really got me excited about Artisteer was …
A relatively new add on called Templateer. It’s been around before Artisteer version 3.0 (I didn’t notice it for a while), but it works beautifully with Artisteer.
Templateer is the solution to Artisteer’s WordPress theme limitations. One of my biggest problems with Artisteer for WordPress themes is the fact you can’t create custom widget areas (or zones). I hated this limitation; yet several new theme vendors were coming out with themes that offered some awesome widget flexibility.
Templateer is an excellent widget limitation. Templateer offers 10 page templates which have a ton of great widget placement options on the home page. This opens Artisteer for WordPress wide open. I spend a weekend creating a custom theme, which with Templateer was able to create a fabulous magazine style home page with featured posts and other features.
Artisteer is no doubt easy-to-use. It’s also a lot of fun because design happens instantly.