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
Wow, Theme Master really sounds great. I have Artisteer but honestly haven't used it much mainly because there are so many amazing wordpress themes available out there and that's my main development tool nowadays but I'll give it a look. Thanks for the nice review and Happy New Year!
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
This is awesome. Thanks so much for sharing. I was familiar with Astisteer but not the other one. Very informative
Strictly for WordPress. Thinking about doing something for Joomla and Drupal later maybe. I'll have to feel out those niches first I suppose.
Here is a site where the owner had me make a seamless match between Website and WordPress blog. I suppose you could do this design easily enough in artisteer, but keep in mind that this blog was created from a template of the parent website that was not created in artisteer. This website was actually created in XSitePro 2. All I had do do was basically take the source code of the home page, modify it just a bit, save it as a template, import it into Theme Master, edit the widget styles to match, and upload the new WordPress blog theme to his server. So I didn't have to sit there and replicate every detail by hand as you would need to in artisteer. Instead, I just imported it. Fast and simple. Quick and easy. Imagine if the design was allot more technical. It would become quite a large job with artisteer, but with Theme Master just import, edit, and upload. I hope I am starting to get the concept and the advantages of Theme Master out in front of everyone now. Be sure to click the blog link on the top right corner to compare website to blog. http://nichewebsiteformula.net/index.html John
Very nice indeed. That first site you showed looks GREAT. Even though it is not finished yet. Good work. I'll definitely be giving the software a try soon. If you are an affiliate send your affiliate link, I would definitely want to buy it from you. Or are you the developer?
Oh ok, only now saw your post mentioning that you are the software developer. THat's good stuff man. Do YOU offer an affiliate program for this? I'd love to promote it.
Also, as a recommendation, you really should have a link on your signature... That would make it easier. Now a question for you, so what you are saying is that I could pull in ANY template in html and make it into a wordpress template? How about something with all kinds of features such as this: http://www.juniormarket.home.pl/aut...x/HTML/7_HTML template/chillibox/01-home.html ??
Hey Boulder, I tried to do it just from the source code of your template. But I am getting a couple javascript errors after I pull it into Theme Master everytime I try and do something to it. I could probably remedy that if I had your complete template package though. It's kind of hard to do it just from the source code since there are other factors such as remote style sheets, javascripts, images, etc. Bummer, I was hoping to whip it up for you. But I guess I can't do it without all the supporting files that the template requires. I was close though. I was able to pull it into Theme Master and start adding widgets and applying styles. But those javascript errors kept coming back everytime the viewer window would refresh. I wonder if it has anything to do with the space (%20) in the url you gave me. (7_HTML%20template) Not sure at this point. John
Hey no worries man, but I appreciate the effort. I've been working with pretty complex templates that have a lot of options and then they also add admin options which are really helpful for newbie users, not that I am one but I'm making sites for people who are...
The complexity of the template is not the issue. I just need all the supporting files that go with it. If I had the whole template package Theme Master could turn it into a WordPress blog theme quite easily. Nice template by the way. Is that your own creation? John
Ha! I don't have the template package. I was wondering if you could do it because I love the template. I ended up buying a similar one that is actually made for wordpress. But just that one template cost $35 so... if you could make it happen, that would be super. I imagine you make lots of templates to sell with your software... hmmmm..
Man oh man! So I cold have gotten in trouble using that as a sample? Funny stuff Boulder. Remind me not to go trick or treating at your house next year. And why isn't my sig showing up, darn it! John