Artisteer 2.1 review

Once you've found a theme that appeals, you can use other commands on the Ideas tab to suggest new colour schemes, typography, menus and so on. With a few clicks you can hone in on a custom design that could easily have taken weeks to produce from scratch.

Output options are just as impressive. Themes can be exported as a collection of HTML, CSS, JS and PNG files ready for use in a program such as Dreamweaver. You can also export designs as ready-to-go themes for use in WordPress or, if you upgrade to the Standard Edition, in Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 5/6.

The nature of design means that you will almost certainly want to tweak things further. With a downloaded template this is a real nightmare, but it's far simpler here. Alongside the main Ideas tab, Artisteer provides no fewer than ten other tabs offering comprehensive control over colour, fonts, layout, background, sheet, header, menus, articles, blocks, buttons and even footers. The icing on the cake is that in each case Artisteer lets you explore your changes live on the layout before you commit yourself. Standard Edition users can call up dialogs to take absolute control.

Without the ability to add styles or edit code directly, Artisteer certainly isn't a complete CSS solution. And it has limitations: liquid CSS layouts aren't supported; there are some problems with how themes interact with CMS modules (most obviously Drupal's Panels); and the way blocks are created rules out multiline headings.

But the program is developing quickly, and these issues are likely to be addressed. Plus, it's so cheap that criticising it for these small weaknesses seems churlish. By making it child's play to automatically create tailor-made and easily customisable themes that look good and work well, Artisteer really could revolutionise the way we all go about designing for the web.

Author: Tom Arah