We all know Wordpress is awesome. Brilliant piece of blogging software, open source and all that other good stuff. But sometimes finding a decent theme is difficult. Or when you do find a decent one you know you have seen it on ten other sites and you want something a little more custom.

Enter Artisteer!

Artisteer front page

I found this little tool almost completely by accident. But what a find! It is basically a point and click template generator. It can generate basic HTML/CSS templates, Wordpress themes, Drupal themes and Joomla themes amongst others.

Currently it is only available for Windows, but with the excellent VMWare or VirtualBox programs, Mac and Linux users can still access the program with relative ease.

Example of 5 minutes work in Artisteer

Once installed you can simply click “Suggest a theme” and it will randomly pick colour palettes, header styles, button styles etc for you. Sometimes jsut clicking this button a few times will at least give you something you like and can then simply tweak to make your perfect theme.

You can select everything, right down to button styles and the wee arrows and dots you get on list items!

Also from my experience, all code that it generates is 100% valid HTML and CSS, and passes all the tests at the w3C Validator, a massive plus point now that even Internet Explorer seems to be wanting to be standards compliant!

And it is very keenly priced. Home/Academic edition is only $49.95 and the Pro version (which allows custom widths and a larger graphics library) is $129.95.

I would make a lot of websites for friends and small businesses, and Wordpress is a great solution for that, allow the client to easily update their own site. With Artisteer you can easily make custom themes for your clients or even just your own blog, quickly and easily.