Several days ago, I found myself struggling to get this site to handle secondary navigation – meaning a layer of navigation below the top level. Specifically, I was trying to add pages below the Services page, but more on that in a second. This site is built on WordPress, which is both a hosted blogging solution at wordpress.com and a blog-centric content management system (CMS) that can be installed on any server (wordpress.org). I am using the latter. In WordPress, you can apply themes which alter the look and feel of the site. There are thousands of free themes available, as well as themes you can buy. The theme I was using for the site was nice to look at, but not very easy to extend beyond a basic blog.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to make the old theme work, and tried a bunch of new themes. I was reaching the point of total exasperation when my friend Kris suggested that I check out Artisteer. Artisteer is a software tool for creating and customizing WordPress, Joomla and other CMS platform themes. I installed it yesterday, and within hours had created a new theme, which is now being used on this site. Artisteer works a lot like a word processing program, allowing you to select elements of a page and select between various options regarding layout, colors, fonts, etc. What it does under the hood is to generate the cascading style sheet (CSS) files and images necessary to implement a theme on your site.

I described last week how I think most local/small businesses should stick with a themed, template driven CMS like Joomla or WordPress, rather than building a custom web site. Artisteer makes that process a lot easier if you don’t want to use one of the free, pre-built themes already available. It is also a lot of fun to use, because the WYSIWIG interface of Artisteer makes changes appear right before your eyes, and the engineers who created it have a pretty good idea of what works and doesn’t work on a web site. Even if you are a master of CSS manipulation (I am not), Artisteer makes the process of creating and editing styles blazing fast.

And why was I adding a Services page? That is because I am getting ready to launch a new business venture with Kris, the friend mentioned above. We have been working together on the new theme, as well as the copy for the site. Have a look at the services and about pages to get a better idea of what we will be doing, and check back soon for a more official announcement of our business launch.

This is a screen shot from Artisteer, taken when we were pretty close to done with the new design:

To demonstrate the flexibility of Artisteer, I also created the WordPress theme below. In fact, this theme only scratches the surface of what Artisteer can do. It took fifteen minutes or so to change colors, fonts, background images, etc. Artisteer also allows you to change the style and location of navigation, make 3D buttons, and a host of other options. I created this theme because I love monkeys, but Kris prefers the theme above. In the spirit of partnership, I’m going to concede this one.

This post may sound like a big advertisement for Artisteer, but really I just wanted to tell people about a very useful tool I found. I don’t have any connection to Artisteer. If your needs are similar to mine, I recommend giving it  a try. You can do so for free, and if you like it the license costs $50 for the Home and Academic Edition or $130 for the Standard Edition.

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