Hello Everyone, I recently had a question from an Artisteer user about the differences of Artisteer and Turbo Flex Pro Theme Master. Here is what I replied with. Hello Benjamin, Please don't get me wrong, Artisteer is an excellent tool. I like it because it can do all kinds of different formats. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, html pages. But where it lacks is the ability to create ANY layout that you want for WordPress themes. Yes, you can create some pretty amazing WordPress themes with Artisteer, but you are still limited to only what the Artisteer "premade" components offer. In most cases, it would be pretty hard to make an exact match of someones own website's home page if that home page had elements in it that Artisteer does not offer. Plain and simple. As good as Artisteer is, it just can't do everything for WordPress themes because the tools and options that are offered is a finite set of tools. So right of the bat, you are working in a limited environment. I went in a different direction with Turbo Flex Pro Theme Master. With Theme Master, you create your own templates OUTSIDE of Theme Master with such tools as Dreamweaver, XSitePro, Expression Web, and absolutely ALL other web editors. OR... you can use premade templates that can have just about any layout under the sun. Even Flash if you want, and then import those templates into Theme Master and update the styles of the widgets to match the styles of the imported template. So in the end, your only limitation is your imagination, not a finite set of tools and options like Artisteer has. Theme Master even makes it totally simple to create a WordPress blog that looks EXACTLY like the parent website that it will belong to. This is possible because you simply import the same template that the parent website used. So you are GUARANTEED to get an exact match. Can you image trying to create a blog that seamessly matches http://nfl.com in Artisteer? That would be a total nightmare, to say the least. Practically impossible. But it is TOTALLY possible with Theme Master. Once again, please do not get me wrong, Artisteer is totally brilliant! But the one fact that cannot be refuted is Artisteer has a finite set of tools and options. And you are locked in to those limitations. You just can't get around that fact. So right from the beginning, your options are limited. With Theme Master, you can import almost anything and turn it into a WordPress blog. Plain and simple. You are not locked into a finite set of rules. One example is this. Not sure that you could do this with Artisteer: (Please note that this is only an example with incomplete links because it has no parent site. Many of the links and the search will point to affitek.com instead.) http://affitek.com/wordpressthememaster/?p=1#comments Another set of premade templates that work well with Theme Master is the hundreds of templates that any Host Gator account offers, like these: http://templates.hostgator.com/ I know for a fact that Artisteer cannot recreate a WordPress blog that match even half of the above designs. But Theme Master can turn ALL of those templates into a WordPress blog. And take a moment to just think about the literal thousands of websites that offer free templates. This translates into UNLIMITED possibilities with Turbo Flex Pro Theme Master. And what about the widgets themselves. If you decide to change the pages widget position, for instance, from one widget area to another, will it instantly take on the styles of that new area while doing your changes from your WordPress blog? Or will it retain the styles it was created with in Artisteer and end up not matching? With Theme Master, it doesn't matter, move your widgets around and they adopt the styles for the new area you place them in! Please let me know if you have any other questions. Have a Happy New Year John King
Check out this video that shows how to prepare any template for importing into Turbo Flex Pro Theme Master and building a WordPress blog theme out of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1s9hShI_Gk John