Website Managers

Posts Tagged ‘Artisteer’

Watch a WordPress theme get created in less than 10 minutes using Artisteer theme designer.

When designing your blog, you want a theme that is pleasing to you and your visitors. There are tens of thousands of WordPress themes available, both free and paid.

What you are about to see is a demo WordPress theme created in 8 minutes. That does not include a lot of the tweaking that you can do, but is enough to put the theme on your site. I use a registered version of Artisteer to design the theme.

The Artisteer free trial puts a watermark on the background and header image. That is ok if you are just trying the software, but to remove it, you have to register. The low registration cost allows you to create as many themes as you want.

Watch the movie to see how easy it is to create themes. It will save you many hours of time searching for the theme that fits your site best.

Get your Artisteer Free Trial here
 

Searching Google for "free WordPress themes" returns 47,700,000 results. That is 47.7 million – far too many to look through to find one that suits you. When you are just getting started with your blog, you are tempted to look for a theme that will fit the content of your site.

How much time do you spend searching, installing, testing and playing with a theme until you grow tired of it and start the process all over? Maybe you found a list of sites to choose themes and keep going back there to try more of them, with most of the themes being free.

Eventually you will want to set yourself apart from the other blogs. When that happens, you will either:

• Buy a theme, which countless others have too
• Hire someone to customize a theme for you, but at what expense?
• Learn to customize themes yourself, but which theme to start with and how much time do you have to put into it while the content suffers?

I have used plenty of free themes and learned to customize them, to a point. Some themes are tougher to work with than others, especially those that have everything defined in one or two files to display the articles and pages.

Looking at this blog, I have been told to change it and make it look more like the other high-traffic blogs. But why would I want to do that, when the whole idea is to stand out and be unique? Yes it took me several days to get it this far and there are some things I want to do with it yet when time permits. However, I will not fall for the idea that it should look like the other sites.

Instead, I prefer to be unique, both in design and delivery. Since this blog is hosted on a sub-domain, it does not rate high in the search engines. That lets me know that the visitors who come here are truly looking for the information I offer, rather than high visitor counts, mostly coming from the search engines, who just land on one page and leave.

The design is different than any other, because I personally compiled the graphics and layout. Of course it would have been much easy using a program such as Artisteer than doing it by hand, but I did not know about Artisteer when designing this site. Since learning about Artisteer, I used it to design StockMarketMasters.com and am very happy with the results.

So you choose how you want your WordPress blog to look. Do it without taking too much time away from building content, because it is the content that will bring visitors, not necessarily the design. The only exception is if your design is so unique that people will tell others just to look at it.

When they do, they will not be referring to your content and the visitors will most likely not be reading it. That is fine if you are selling designs, but not if you are selling or providing anything else.

Since Artisteer works for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and stand-alone (non-blogging) sites, at least download a free trial and see for yourself how creative you can be with it. Above all, stand out from the crowd!