Artisteer & Thesis & StudioPress

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I'm looking into doing a more traditional website with multiple pages that incorporates a blog, and am currently looking at Artisteer & Thesis & StudioPress. I'd like to do as least amount of coding as possible -- for this non-techie, it's a big time-sink.

My own tentative feedback so far:

Artisteer purports to take the coding away, but on their forums I see that do get beyond a certain level (such as having a multiple page website, etc), you get into coding. Also, I saw this comment on the Warrior Forum(don't know if it's true). "Artisteer is the modern day FrontPage...don't bother...the generated themes are full of crap bloated code..." Is this true?

Thesis... again, I've heard it's not so code-free as it purports to be. Looks like to do any customization you need "hooks," ie which basically just make the coding easier... but you still need to study coding.

StudioPress... don't know much about. But I assume that off the shelf it's less customizable than the above unless you really know coding.

Any feedback? thanks from this newbie!
#artisteer #studiopress #thesis #thesis theme
  • Profile picture of the author pobrien
    I've only used Thesis and have no experience with Artisteer or StudioPress, but I'll do my best to address some of your concerns.

    To begin with, the use of a theme shouldn't have much to do with your desire to create a multi-page website with a blog. I do that all the time and WordPress makes that pretty easy. For sites that have lots of pages in a hierarchy I've used the "Flexi Pages Widget" and "Yoast Breadcrumbs" plugins (in combination with each other). I'm not 100% happy with either of them, but they got me 95% of what I wanted and I couldn't find anything better. Take a look at them.

    As for the theme, that really depends on what you want to accomplish. I like simple looking sites with good SEO. Thesis gives me that and I'm pretty happy with it, although, like anything, I still want more from it and I'm looking forward to version 2.0.

    I haven't reviewed these yet, but I'd also recommend looking at Headway and Hybrid. They are newer than Thesis but seem to be getting a good amount of buzz and might be a better fit depending on your needs.

    Hope that helps.
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    • Profile picture of the author Karen Blundell
      I was the one who posted about Artisteer being crap...but hundreds would disagree with me just like lovers of FrontPage would disagree with me about how crappy it is. But I'm a coder, so I'm picky. :p

      Thesis, StudioPress, etc., are premium themes created by fine developers who wrote the code from scratch. The code on these themes is clean, valid, beautiful. I would recommend them because they can be customized to suit.
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  • Profile picture of the author falconeye848
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    • I would recommend Thesis. You can do some amazing things with it.
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  • Profile picture of the author jjpmarketing
    My thoughts on Artisteer are this... While a good attempt in theory, it still fails to deliver what it needs to deliver to be great... a well coded theme for WordPress. However, it can be used for a nice inspirational tool if you are a developer. It allows you to change and tweak colors (but not so much on the layout) with the click of a button or two.

    So you can take what you get from Artisteer and then turn it into a well coded site. If you aren't a developer you could use it to present your ideas to a developer to properly code a theme for you.

    On Thesis vs StudioPress, I would opt for Thesis first. Some studiopress themes are nice, but I just like Thesis better.

    Dennis
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    • Profile picture of the author EricGibson
      Originally Posted by Jeff Hope View Post

      Hi Eric,


      BTW, it is possible to combine Artisteer with Thesis or Frugal (and I'm sure Headway as well), so you sort of get the best of both worlds. Create your design with Artisteer, take a screenshot of it with SnagIt, then slice it up to create a "shell" around the main Thesis / Frugal theme.

      Jeff
      Wow, that sounds great! thanks, I'll try that... I assume you mean taking a snapshot of only certain parts of something from the Artisteer and then pasting that (or putting the specs) of the corresponding section in the Thesis or Wordpress theme?

      Update... at this point, I'm probably leaning toward Headway rather than Thesis as my tie-in to WordPress. From the feedback I find, it seems even more user-friendly (less coding) than Thesis, while retaining the great SEO...
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  • Profile picture of the author samuraiwriting
    I was once in your shoes and searched through all three of those as well. I considered Artisteer but it didn't show me what I needed. Studio Press was good but didn't leave room for me to change the look easily. I decided upon Thesis.

    The reason is because Thesis has an easy dashboard to use. If you watch the video that Chris puts out, you basically learn a lot of what you need to know in customizing the look. I then learned how to make a landing page from a blog that gave me the code I needed. I just had to figure out where to put it in the hooks. A message to the blog owner helped me with that.

    Then I wanted the Featured Content slidebox on my site. That was an easy fix. It took me about 3 hours though since it just takes me awhile I guess. Really all you have to do is copy and paste the code then upload the content to the right folder.

    Anyway I am happy with Thesis. I put a free skin on the site for now and am really impressed with my own work (and Chris'). I'm making another site now using Thesis and am excited about how it will look too (similar to copyblogger's look).
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    • Profile picture of the author EricGibson
      Thanks for the positive feedback on Thesis. I think where I'm at now is to use Artisteer just for getting ideas about layout, etc (as someone advised me they use it for), and then incorporate those ideas into either Thesis or Headway (for which I've gotten positive feedback on both). I'm leaning toward Headway (which I understand is somewhat easier than Thesis for a non-coder), but since I have some weeks before I actually need to work on this, I may wait for Thesis 2 to see if that has leapfrogged over Headway. (the internet changes so fast, it's hard to keep up!)
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  • Profile picture of the author jgant
    I'd go with StudioPress (the new Gensis parent/child framework rocks). I bought Artisteer but it didn't have the flexibility I wanted. I agree it's good in concept. I also suggest checking out Builder by iThemes - it too uses the parent/child framework. I use mostly StudioPress and Builder by iThemes.
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  • Profile picture of the author robertvance
    I would go with the Thesis them. Not only is it highly customizable but you can get custom skins to change the look to suite your needs. The thesis theme allows you to writ custom routines and conect them with standard wordpress code so that instead of having to modify the theme code (Not recommended too easy to break your site ) yourself you can do just about anything you need in the custom functions and hook it into the Thesis theme. This gives you great flexability.

    Hope this helps.
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  • Profile picture of the author kiteg2
    I have to agree with the code from artisteer. I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to code properly. Artisteer has really bad code.

    I have Thesis, and have a set design in mind and am finding it harder than hell to change. Thesis code is great except they put a link to thesis in the footer. For a theme that bost and indeed provides such great SEO, that ruins it for me. The thesis link in the footer will get picked up by search engines.

    I am now looking into getting a thesis skin made and that may be the best option if you have something specific in mind.

    I have two different designs/concepts and am planning to get both created as a thesis skin.

    Hope that might be useful to you.
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    • Profile picture of the author pobrien
      Originally Posted by kiteg2 View Post

      I have to agree with the code from artisteer. I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to code properly. Artisteer has really bad code.

      I have Thesis, and have a set design in mind and am finding it harder than hell to change. Thesis code is great except they put a link to thesis in the footer. For a theme that bost and indeed provides such great SEO, that ruins it for me. The thesis link in the footer will get picked up by search engines.

      I am now looking into getting a thesis skin made and that may be the best option if you have something specific in mind.

      I have two different designs/concepts and am planning to get both created as a thesis skin.

      Hope that might be useful to you.
      If you have the developer version of Thesis you have the right to remove the link to thesis in the footer. That's one of the first things I do when I set up a new blog. I use the Thesis OpenHook plugin, which makes it super easy to do this. Just type in your new footer information and check the option to remove the link to thesis.

      I'm not a designer but there are quite a few who are using Thesis. And the thesis skins market is really going to take off, IMO. Especially once Thesis 1.7 gets out of beta, because it has a feature that lets you import/export all your Thesis settings - something the skins community is going to love and something that will make it super easy to buy and install a Thesis skin.
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