Artisteer – Review in PCPro
These days, whether you’re working on a static website, dynamic application or content management system, the final appearance of your pages comes down to cascading style sheets (CSS). Artisteer is designed to reinvent the way that CSS is handled, and it does so with considerable success.
To understand what’s so radical about Artisteer, it’s necessary to understand the advantages that CSS brings – and the problems. The great strength of CSS is its centralised control, flexibility and efficiency: update a single rule and the look and feel of your entire site updates accordingly. It’s simple in theory, but not in practice. The inherent complexity of trying to manage all the possible elements of a design through CSS, with its hundreds of parameters, cascade of rules, and infuriatingly different browser implementations, means most users never stray beyond the default templates provided by Dreamweaver or their CMS.
To get around this, you can visit one of dozens of online directories to download preset themes created by real CSS experts. But even this approach isn’t ideal, as the design you choose is neither unique nor tailored to your content. And if you try to adapt the design to ensure that it is, you’re thrown back into the complexities of directly editing CSS.
This is where Artisteer comes in. At first sight the program seems very much like one of the online theme directories. It looks as if it simply provides a number of preset templates to apply to your layout, but this isn’t how it works at all.
Instead, when you hit the large Suggest Design icon on the ribbon bar’s Ideas tab, Artisteer randomly generates something for you. It’s a clever idea that takes full advantage of the flexibility and power of CSS, but it also sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s hard enough to find an attractive hand-crafted template, so what are the chances that a computer-generated theme will fit the bill?
The good news is that the Artisteer approach works brilliantly. It’s clear that, rather than changing parameters at random, it intelligently varies groups of elements together to produce consistent, coherent and attractive designs. And the advanced dropdown menus and use of generated bitmap textures show Artisteer is going well beyond straight CSS.
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
GoDaddy vs JustHost – An Update
It has been over a week now and all seems good with JustHost. I have found that the load times are a bit faster than with GoDaddy but the ability to change some of the DNS settings is limited.
Because I was integrating Google Apps into the domain, I needed to create a few CNAME records and add some MX records while deleting the default mail behaviours. With GoDaddy, this is a straight forward exercise and does not require any help desk intervention.
With JustHost, I could change the MX records easily but they do not support multiple entries with the same priority. A simple workaround was to create sequential priorities within a range grouping and this seems to be working well.
As for the CNAME records, I had to email support and they made the appropriate changes for me. This only took about 30min for them to do this and the propagation was complete within 2 hours.
Overall, I am very pleased with JustHost and will be adding new services here rather than GoDaddy in the future.
My existing sites will remain on GoDaddy as it will take too long to move everything across although I may move one of them because JustHost offer a porting service.
