Book Image

Creating Templates with Artisteer

By : Jakub Sanecki
Book Image

Creating Templates with Artisteer

By: Jakub Sanecki

Overview of this book

Designing good looking, professional quality web templates or building your own website are rather complicated tasks, demanding a lot of technical and graphical expertise. Artisteer has changed this situation, enabling you to do it by yourself, without the need to learn skills such as HTML, web-programming languages, or drawing."Creating stunning Templates with Artisteer" is a practical, step-by-step guide that will show you how you can prepare an elegant, professional looking website, on your own, using features of Artisteer. It also describes the process of designing templates for various popular CMS platforms like WordPress or Joomla!, by giving you practical hints, showing how to install those templates and how to import the content into CMS. "Creating stunning Templates with Artisteer" leads you through the process of designing a website, including all standard layout elements, from header to the footer, including menus and special boxes. You will learn how to prepare the templates, store them and export them in the form of ready-to-use HTML pages or packages that can be installed in various CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, or DotNetNuke. The last part of the book shows you some tips and tricks that allow you to extend standard themes generated by Artisteer for enriching the website with image gallery, combining two menus, and more.You will learn how to create a professional quality website or CMS template on your own, with the use of Artisteer with minimal technical difficulties.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Static page template versus CMS template


CMS template creation is a different process from creating templates for static websites, and requires consideration from a different point of view. Let's try to describe in detail the differences between those two cases, and keep in mind some hints that can be useful.

Tip

Focus on the design. The content is out of scope.

When designing a static site, you do it usually considering the concrete, or at least planned content. Think about what we did in the previous chapter. We started with the preparation of the scheme that showed the structure of the site. We knew all the subpages it will consist of and what content will be presented on every page. On this basis, we made the decision that the main menu will be a horizontal one, and that we will also have the complementary vertical menu. In the case of the CMS template, the situation looks quite different; often you will not even know what kind of content will be published. You can't assume that the site...