As someone that is pretty clueless about graphic design concepts but recognizes the importance of doing it well, I'm very interested in hearing comments on this from people that aren't so clueless in the graphic design side of website development. My initial impression is that this looks like a wysiwyg editor for theming. But since the only people likely to use something like this are the site developers, is this something that can generate clean code - or at least code that's reasonable enough that it can be cleaned up by someone with basic html/css knowledge?

Top Notch Themes has a review and some comments:

clicky

Here is my take...Every designer, even those of us who like to work with the code, at some point would like a tool to quickly convert an idea (image) into reality (template file). If/when that tool becomes available; I'd like to know about it.

I'm not so sure Artisteer fits the bill.

The tag line grabbed my attention:

"With Artisteer YOU immediately become a Web design expert...creating Web design templates...[with] no technical skills."

First off, professional tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign don't make people experts so I wonder how this could.

Also, if you're serious about being a designer or developer (or whatever) you WANT technical skill. That skill only comes from study which often becomes a necessity only when we come upon a situation we don't understand.

Lastly, every auto-formatting tool I've seen has trouble getting the code right. There are times when you need to deviate from the standard, but you should understand when you need to and why. Although their homepage is standards compliant, skstarkiller's example is not. http://validator.w3.org/

That's my .02!

Blessings!

-NP

It seems that if you just need a basic theme, you could use this to set up your theme, then tweak it like you're tweaking anything else. Might give you a leg up to quickly set up a blog.

Tony

I'm a minister, not a designer or a developer. While I want to be a real geek, I don't have time to learn web development and do my day job. I can, however, tweak CSS from online tutorials and printed books.

I've got two live WordPress sites that I manage (the church's and my own) plus a sandbox installation of both Drupal and Joomla! to determine which way to go when the church site needs to grow up. I played with Artisteer and redesigned my personal site (www.eggmonkey.org --- I like it, and my kids like it), and I "designed" a test site for both the Drupal and Joomla! sandboxes. It seems to have put all the correct files together for all three, and my personal site passed W3C validation, and the only CSS problems seem to be with a plugin.

Am I a designer now? No. Do I understand these three CMS platforms better? Just a bit. Is Artisteer worth $100? So far, yes.