Another very fine website design tool that runs on your PC
Artisteer website builder is an excellent low cost tool that allows you to quickly create a website.
Their website shows a Mac version is on the way and a Linux version is down the road but at the time of this article only the Windows PC version is available.
Artisteer is more geared to the professional designer and comes in two versions - Standard ( $129.95 ) and Home edition ( $49.95 ). For a user that wants a simple to use WYSIWYG design software this one does fill the bill. The Home Edition comes with many templates and art work to make designing your site very easy. Unlike other design tools which has a fixed number of templates this one builds templates by use of a suggest button.
The suggest feature also can alter the template you picked to change any part of it such as menu position, background images / patterns and more. I found it no harder than using MS Word to work on a design and I think you too will find it easy to use.
For a user that wants a simple to use WYSIWYG design software this one does fill the bill and it has all the bells and whistles that one would desire.
When you have your design completed you can publish it or export it to HTML, Blogger Template or Wordpress Theme. Now this is realy a neat feature as for many that would like to use Wordpress but may find it hard to find a template that fits and may find it harder to make the template look the way you want even if you did find one you like. Here all you do is design your website on your own PC and when done export or publish it.
The Standard Version is basicly the same as the Home version except it can not only export as a Blogger Template or Wordpress Theme it can do more.
The Standard Version can also export as a Joomla, Drupal or DotNetNuke template!
In addition there are plug-ins available to export to others and it comes with a Library of Textures, Glares and Gradients plus more.
It has a good clean design and even a novice will find it not hard to use.
It does not have a drag and drop object type of design which is popular today as it's more a basic editor.
The the default creates a Responsive design but can be set to fixed size.
The HTML produced is very good as I do not see anything that profesionals may complain about.
It has excellent FTP support as you can set port selection, secure or non secure and SCP connections.
On the downside it does not allow you to open a Template or HTML file that you may have purchased.
Be sure to turn off suggest mode when you no longer want to use it else things you click on will change to a new suggested design.
The import is limited to Artisteer file types only.
There is no way to edit / view the whole page HTML as source. You can right click and edit a small section which opens a plain text window with two check boxes. One is for word wrap ( on or off) and the other is edit whole article. When edit whole article is checked everything in a column is brought into the plain text editor and a message which states warning after saving everything will be combined into one cell. You can edit the HTML or CSS when done with the design when you export it as the HTML code is clean and easy to read.
There is no application help as clicking on help sends you to a PDF document on their website.
This needs to be addressed as it took me quite some time to find out you can't import html files.
Overall I find it an excellent choice for anyone that is looking for an easy to use tool for website design and the added feature of being able to export the design to a template for Wordpress, Joomla or any of the others is a big plus.
