Once we had WordPress installed and working, it was time to make the web site look nice. We wanted it to look like our current web site, but with a new color pallet. WordPress is great about separating the function from the look and feel. It uses themes to control the site layout.
What were the options for getting the theme we needed? We could find a free theme, buy one of the flexible themes, build a theme, pay someone else to build a theme, or use a tool that would generate a theme. I didn’t think I could find a free theme that would work. Actually, I just didn’t want to spend hours going through the thousands of available free themes. I don’t have any experience with the flexible themes that are available. I know some CSS and have read about pHp. I have a pretty a strong technical background, but I am not ready to take on building a theme from scratch. I didn’t really want to pay a third party and I had some experience generating themes with an interesting tool called Artisteer. So, I decided to give Artisteer a try.
Artisteer generates custom themes for WordPress and other popular CMS systems. It provides an easy interface to control a wide range of the details in a theme layout. I have found Artisteer easy to use and very flexible. The newest version (2.0) has some nice new features and seems to generate pretty good code. I got our new logo and made the graphics I would need with Photoshop (another amazing tool). I spent about an hour working back and forth to get the theme as close to our current design as I could with Artisteer. I generated the template, installed it on the site and reviewed it. It took three or four iterations before I made it match pretty well. After that I still needed to make some layout changes to get the graphics into just the right position and to get all the background images and colors in place. That took another two hours fighting with CSS adjustments. It only took about a dozen changes, but I always get frustrated when I can’t find the right place to make a change. Thanks to Larry for helping me out with this. I did learn more about CSS , so overall it was a good learning experience.
I would give my final theme an A- and Artisteer an B+ on building exactly what I wanted. Artisteer got pretty close. It really only took about 4 or 5 hours to get the theme to a presentable state. I think that is pretty fast.
Now to add a new page template for the front page and to get the side bar widgets to display the correct graphics.
Related posts:
- Part 1: Using WordPress and Artisteer on a new Business website
- Making Your Own WordPress Themes with Artisteer
- Part 3: Using WordPress and Artisteer on a new Business website
- Seven Reasons I Like WordPress
- Problem: Friend needs a website – Solution: WordPress
- WordPress is Great!
- Seven things I learned at iThemes Bootcamp
I like to solve problems with technology. In this blog, I'd like to share some of my ideas and also tell you about solutions I am currently working on. Welcome, and please share your own ideas with me by leaving a comment.
Great series, David. Thanks for sharing how it’s coming with WordPress for your business. Out of curiosity, what CMS or content platform are you currently using for MBO Partners?
Glad you are enjoy this series on how we are testing using WordPress in our business.
We have a custom CMS that we got from the 3rd party that designed and build our public our web site.
We also have a large suite of custom web applicatinons we use for nearly all aspects of running our busiesss that are all built on WebSphere and DB2. These have been developed by our team in house.
Thanks for the comment and question.
Any ideas on how to get the tag cloud html links to work with my Artisteer 2 generated theme. When you click on any of the tags I get a “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here” page.