usfemail

I am tired of using the same boring Wordpress templates; and am considering Artisteer. I have never used it before and wondering if anyone who has any experience with it can suggest whether it is a good buy or not.

Should I get the Standard Edition or Home and Academic Edition? There is a big difference in price not sure which one I need to build niche sites.

Thanks

Kirk Ward

About the only difference I have seen is the platform that each one develops for. The lowest cost is the Home edition, and it builds for Wordpress.

I have almost decided against Artisteer because of three things. I have heard it produces "bloated" code which slows delivery of the pages, it is limited in the layouts it can produce, and finally, the demo I did changed background, highlight and font colors after I uploaded it. Went from a shade of green to a shade of blue on the same monitor.
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LivingCovers

It wasn't like that for me. I created a custom blog with artisteer and it came out o.k. Have a look at it here;

www.electric-scooters-guide.com

And tell me what you think!

tyler99

I have Artisteer -- the expensive edition. I like it and it is easy to slap together a theme that is customized to your liking.

I don't notice any loading or color and have about 8-10 blogs using it.

I also have Thesis and like it a lot but it is a little more difficult to use. It could be just sheer luck but my Thesis sites seem to get google love pretty quickly.

If you are going to do a lot of niche blogs, get Artisteer or Thesis. If this is just for a couple of blogs -- just use a free theme, IMO.

DannyUK

There's a reason Google loves Thesis but is indifferent to Artisteer. The former produces professional SEO ready(ish) code and the latter produces bloated, unoptimised "code". Artisteer *looks* impressive at first glance but when you try to achieve any fine detail it's a real struggle. I bought it, was impressed for a few minutes and then found myself diving into the code it produced to fix things by hand - a bit of a waste of time really considering the product is meant to be click and play. And eventually everything it produced started to look the same, I know that sounds weird given the permutations but various page elements give the game away.

It depends what you want. If you don't care about SEO and just want to slap up a few blogs that need fairly basic themes then Artisteer is an okay but fairly expensive option for what you get.

If SEO is a requirement and you can spare the time to get to grips with Thesis (it's not that difficult) then it's your only choice by comparison.

I was checking a site of mine the other day that uses another very well known and expensive theme specifically designed for IM. I ran it through the W3C validator and got 193 errors! Just goes to show, you might get the perfect look for your blog but it pays to check what's going on under the hood, or get someone else to do it for you if you don't know your XHTML from your elbow.

I've tried loads of different themes looking for the holy grail. In the end I had to build my own based on a brilliant piece of work by Matthew James Taylor, it's worth looking him up and grabbing his open source (free) templates as a starting point.

tyler99

I can't comment on the bloated code but the results I have achieved with Artisteer are very respectable.

At least 3 of my Artisteer blogs, I'm on the front page of google for some very competitive keywords and get a decent amount of traffic.

After trying Xsite pro, affiliate genie, artisteer, thesis and probably others I am forgetting, I think if you know how to SEO optimize a site or blog you get results with most stuff out there.

usfemail

Thanks for all the responses I will definitely continue to look into Artisteer and the Thesis theme to see which one I will go with?

bgmacaw

W3C is only a geek bragging point. It doesn't have a thing to do with SEO.

I do agree that the Artisteer code is rather bloated with a number of placekeeper divs and other markup. However, the load speed I've seen on Artisteer themes is quite decent.

DannyUK

I wasn't specifically talking about web standards in terms of SEO, rather I was warning that even the expensive themes don't guarantee quality. But I did say in an earlier post, if you care about SEO don't go with Artisteer and maybe that needs clarification. I should have said if you care to fine degrees because in the end it's the content that counts above all. Everything else is fine tuning but improvement nonetheless.

However. W3C is the benchmark for ensuring your code is valid. This has nothing to do with geeks or bragging rights, it's about doing something right or doing something wrong. Just as we have a structure to the spoken language and people find it easier when everyone sticks to the standard so the web has its own languages. Pigeon HTML might get you by but its hardly a soapbox from which to look down on those doing it properly.

The only reason junk code displays at all is because most browsers will compensate by making certain assumptions in an attempt to tidy the mess up. This takes the browser longer to process code than if the page was clean in the first place. The big debate right now is whether Google is going to start (or already is) taking load speed into account as part of their ranking algorithms. Also each browser will work on a different set of assumptions so junk code greatly increases the chance of cross browser compatibility issues. Now that FireFox is in the game it's no longer an escape route to code for IE only, as used to be the sorry state of affairs.

So I totally disagree with your dismissal in the context you've introduced it and I'd also say that in Internet marketing, where percentage points can make all the difference, dropping the ball in any area isn't a wise move.

Yes, Artisteer can quickly produce a theme and for non-technical users this can be highly useful. That's why I bought it myself, initially I didn't know anything about WordPress themes so it was ideal to get me started. But once I gained a bit of knowledge I quickly realised Artisteer was a short term option for the reasons I've previously given.

Now it just sits on my disk and I won't ever use it again, which means for me it was a poor investment. Not the first, won't be the last either.

Scott Million

I use 99 designs for a lot of my clients http://99designs.com/

Great for professional, custom WP themes... I wouldn't use them for a minisite as it wouldn't be that cost effective (even though it's relatively cheap), but for a client, long term business or authority site it's worth looking into.

Audrey Harvey

I bought Artisteer some time ago, and it's fine. However, since I purchased a developer's license to a premium theme, I don't use it any more.

I use Diana Lane's abundance theme (link to her wso) -
http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...wordpress.html

It is so easy to use, and looks great. I just find now that Artisteer themes all look a bit the same, and every blog I build I use Abundance.

bgmacaw

Like I said, geek bragging rights. Sure, you don't want unmatched tags and other broken code that won't render correctly in all the major browsers. But, if you use <b> instead of <strong> or <center> instead of divs or even embed an YouTube video you're violating W3C standards.

Once you get outside of the narrow tech/web/SEO/IM savvy area you'll find a huge number of 1998 style FrontPage or Word created sites that perform just fine. It's not to say that they couldn't be improved but they get the job done because they have age and links on their side. Their sloppy site will beat a perfectly designed site that someone slaved over for days/weeks to create and tweak.

Basically, I think that spending a huge amount of time tweaking a site for W3C compliance and such is a waste of time beyond insuring a decent load time and no broken code. The important thing is to get good quality links and promote your sites in other ways. If you're planning on having a lot of niche sites, you won't have time to waste and Artisteer is a good way to save time without outsourcing.