13 best new features of Artisteer 3 exposed
June 18, 2011 
8 Comments
Since a couple of days, Artisteer 3 has been released. For people who don’t know Artisteer; Artisteer is a layout (template) generator. It helps you to create beautiful and professional looking designs for your website (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, .Net,…).
I’ve been using Artisteer for over 2 years and in that time I made several WordPress websites with an Artisteer template. The reason is simple, I create professional websites very fast, so my clients have to pay less.
Because I’m very excited about Artisteer 3, I’m going to begin with an overview of the new features. A full review is on top of my todo list and will be published very soon!
So, what are all those new features?
1. Select styles for Ideas
In Artisteer it’s possible to let the software suggest you designs. This can be the whole design, or just a part of the design (header, colors,…). This is a great feature to learn about the possibilities AND to get some ideas. The only thing missing in the previous version of Artisteer, was that the suggested designs could differ a lot. So now they made this feature a little better: the devided the designs in different categories, and you can select which categories you want for the ideas functionality: General, Corporate, Holiday, Green, Retro,… In that way, when you’re working on a corporate site, you won’t get ideas for a holiday design.
2. Additional header and background graphics and effects
There are a lot more graphics and effects for the header and background in Artisteer 3. Also here, they put everything in categories, so it’s easier to find the graphic or effect you like
3. A lot more color themes
The previous version of Artisteer was already full of color themes. With a color theme you can change all the colors of your design. Artisteer 3 has even more color themes!
4. More design layout options
Artisteer 2 was very good, but had some design limitations. For example, the menu could be under or above the header. Allthough this was a great feature, it was also a bit old fashioned. Artisteer 3 adds a lot of possibilities here.
5. Flash headers are included
To be honest, I don’t like Flash. But anyway, it’s cool that they added the option in Artisteer 3 so you can add a flash header now. There are even some examples (snow that falls down, clouds passing by,…) included. And I must say, it looks nice!
6. Support for fluid layouts (resizable sheet width)
Another limitation of Artisteer 2 was that you could only used fixed sizes (pixels) and no fluid sizes (%). I’m very happy to see that they added the option to also fill in fluid sizes. So now it’s possible to give the width of your site a % in stead of a fixed with.
7. Interactive web design preview area
Artisteer has a lot of options. If you just start with Artisteer, it can be confusing to learn which menu and which options affect which parts of your design. This problem is solved! Just click on a part in your design (header, menu, block,…) and the right tab in the menu will be selected:
This is a huge step forward for beginners!
8. Create your website and publish it to Artisteer.net
This new amazing feature lets you create a blog or website IN Artisteer. No need to export the theme and install it in your blog or website, no. Just click a button and you can upload it to the internet!
9. Web design and website samples
There are some build in templates, and you can also download templates of Artisteer.com. At this way, you can select a template you like, and change it the way you want.
10. Header and footer can now be page-wide
This is a little design feature, but it can make your design a little bit nicer.
11. Simply choose your own favicon
A favicon is a little image that is shown in the url bar of your favorite browser.
In Artisteer 3 you can now select an existing favicon, or opload an image that Artisteer will use as a favicon. I like this very much, because there are a lot of websites out there with the favicon of Drupal, Joomla or something else.
12. New vertical menu
An new feature of Artisteer 3 that I really like is creating vertical menus. In my opinion, this was one of the biggest limitations of the previous version of Artisteer. Now it’s easy to combine: you can use the upper horizontal menu for your pages, and the vertical menu for categories or vice versa. What I really would like is that you could use the vertical menu as a submenu of the horizontal (upper) menu. I think I’ll contact Artisteer for a feature request 
.
13. Custom CSS support
In the previous versions, everybody could see you were using an Artisteer template; all CSS-classes where using the “art-” prefix. Now you can define your own prefix.
You can also add your own css styles to your template. This is a great new feature! In the previous version you had to add your own css-styles to the exported css file. But when you updated your template in Artisteer, your own css-styles where deleted. The possibility to add your own css-files catches this problem.
Almost finished: Artisteer 3 supports Microsoft Sharepoint
Yes, you read this correctly. They are going to add support for Sharepoint. I know, most WordPress users don’t use Sharepoint, but for a lot of others this is a new nice feature. It’s still in bèta phase, so I’m excited to see the result!
More information about Artisteer 3
Conclusion
As you can see, there are some amazing new features. I’ll test Artisteer 3 the comming days, and I’ll publish the review very soon.
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