Should I buy Artisteer or pay a drupal themer?

So you mean there are only 2 options in life, either paying for a software or have someone create a theme for you? There is nothing suitable in all the free drupal themes available?

If the anwer to the second question is no, then I guess with $200 you can't have a lot done, but it may be doable by paying someone in a country with low cost of living, india/pakistan, but you need to find someone with previous experience and willing to work for $200.

Buying a software to create your theme is probably like choosing a free theme and tweaking it to suit your particular needs. You can save the $150 and pay yourself for the time spent tweaking the free theme, since with a software you'll have to work too, so time would be better spent working on tweaking themes rather than learning to use the said software.

That's my opinion, others will differ.

topnotchthemes is also worth looking at as well as their fusion core theme to build a sub theme.

Yet another option is to find a free html/css theme (there are tons more than drupal themes and many are very slick) and convert it to a drupal theme (which is really not that difficult).

I have used itemplater and their themes are in the 40$ range.

Could you possibly be confused in what is theming and what is layout?

You say that it seems that the free themes are done with Artisteer, however, since I have never even heard of it until now I severely doubt this. Because you seem to believe so leads me to think that what you are looking for is actually a different layout.

Using Panels or Views, sometimes even a combination of both, you can restructure your site to give the illusion of a different theme. In reality however, it is just altering the way the data is presented. This is what makes Drupal sites look like blogs or more robust websites.

If this is the case, I think you will need to be more specific as to what you are tying to accomplish so we can steer you in a better direction and what modules you can use.

As far as Artisteer is concerned however, my number one rule is to never buy anything from a website if there is no contact phone number. Second, sites that do not accept credit cards themselves and go through Paypal are probably not carrying enough sales to warrant going through the trouble of getting a payment gateway and merchant account. This makes me think that Artisteer may not be your ideal solution.

As an added note, I recently completed a setup and themed a Drupal site for $400 in payments and low-balled it specifically because I knew the situation the person in particular was in. You may be able to come up with some arrangement with someone willing to do this as well.

http://acquia.com/community/resources/acquia-tv/tips-and-tricks-drupal-t...

I am giong to be a bit redundant here with one other replier... I too think that your best bet is to look for a free theme that matches what you want to do. Don't look at the images and colors as much as the potential to organize your content. Layout can be changed by combining views, modules, and other cool stuff. New modules, and configuration will probably make your site shine more than a custom theme.

If you want a unique Drupal theme that no one else has, I think you are probably looking at a similar solution someone else already worked on. Except, that you will go through the extra effort. It's kind of like re-inventing the wheel. There are thousands and thousands of themes already available. Give that a try and save your cash for the drinks to keep you going when working on your particular implementation. You are going to have to implement your solution anyway.

Good luck.

While I haven't used it personally (I did download the trial, liked how it worked) I work with a team who runs the websites for our local school district. They bought this program and I love the way the themes look.

I don't know how much digging you've done into the different pieces of this program, but so far we like it. Here's two examples:
http://pcep.pccs.k12.mi.us/
http://communityeducation.pccs.k12.mi.us

These were created with Artisteer and as you can see they're quite custom and function very well. I'd suggest buying it over paying somebody to create the theme for you.

I am extremely happy with my $70 theme purchase from ThemeShark.com
You also won't need to pay anyone to make minor changes to it. All of these theme design companies have support forums and your questions will actually get answered much, much faster and better than on the standard Drupal forum. I don't think a purchase from TopNotch is a good idea unless you simply want to waste money. Search Google for how to turn a HTML template into a Drupal theme and you won't believe how easy it really is.

Tip: Private individual's blog posts and video tutorials are the best place to learn, you'll see.

I've tried Artisteer, and after evaluating it, recommended it highly for small-to-mid-range sites.
Although I'm a hand-coder from way back, The generated code is good, robust and semantic (enough).
The control and options are extensive.

I told a partner company to get it for their daily work, and the investment has paid of many many times over in just a few months. It can turn a 2 day job into a 20 minute one.
There will always be a ceiling for just how far you can customize things with a GUI, but that cut off is way up near the 95% mark.

Taking a free theme and changing it yourself probably puts you in the 60-70% point, after which you have to learn CSS and spend time on any number of unreliable hand-tweaks. Not everyone has those skills, or that time. How much is your time worth? Would you get a better result than a professional?

For something like design, which is so subjective, I think you'll find a lot of time lost in communication if you want to get an outsourced designer to do it from scratch. And the results may be OK , but may also be seriously technically wrong depending on who you get.
For under $200, I'd say it would be great if you found a "designer" who already has artisteer, has a pretty good eye, and could use it on your behalf and make a set of small post-hoc changes as needed.
That would be great value for money, and the most efficient all round. Could be a good little business.

I'm an old hand-coding guy, and have worked through a decade looking at HTML generators, (frontpage, dreamweaver, hotdog, even composer and many many more) and several years deconstructing Drupal themes. I was extremely skeptical that Artisteer could be halfway good. But it is. I gotta say artisteer deserves to own the market for a certain price range of designs.

I installed Artisteer just before rebuilding my computer; I played around with it and it seems pretty powerful, but I never got around to using an Artisteer theme on a Drupal installation. I understand from the Artisteer forums that the themes created for Drupal do not work out-of-the-box: one has to roll up one's sleeves and tweak (and thoroughly test) the code to have a functional Drupal theme.

I also have Dreamweaver CS5, which does (finally) interface directly with Drupal and let you do some true WYSIWYG theme development. But you still need to roll up your sleeves and make changes to the code in multiple Drupal files for every change in your theme. Dreamweaver CS5 just lets you keep track of all the files that a change impacts, and allows global code modifications to multiple files at once so you are not opening files one at a time and tweaking code, or forgetting a file that a change impacts.

I too would love to see some professional reviews of Artisteer for Drupal. Themeing is without question the hardest part of developing a good Drupal site, and a WYSIWYG tool for Drupal would be a great thing. I have searched for such reviews, but most of the reviews seem to be by writers who get compensated for promoting Artisteer. That alone raises a giant red flag for me: flooding the web with bogus reviews is not anything a professional software company would do.

I will not buy Artisteer until I see some reviews on established and trusted technical web sites; especially Drupal-related ones. Even some reviews that say it is not a viable option for Drupal theme development would be a big help to the Drupal community; especially for new Drupal Users.

I've used Artisteer and found it worth the price, even if it is used only as a way of generating many different theme ideas very quickly. Using Artisteer, I can have a new site up and running in less than an hour, using a very simple theme as a professional looking starting point. After that, my client has the option of paying me to create a finely crafted custom theme that nobody else is using.

Since you can try Artisteer for free, why not try it and then decide whether to buy it? That's what I did.

Cheers!

Downloaded it, tried to realize a design idea and I got colors and general form but no way near the kind of complete design I was looking and hoping for. It's useful to share general ideas quickly but there are other tools for that too. Clearly Artisteer is attempting to fill a need (a large need at that), but it's not quite filling it. Whoever does finaly create a robust themeing tool for drupal is going to get their own parade at the next DrupalCon.

Buying and using Artisteer is not = using free theme. As a matter of fact to generate a good theme with artisteer you need to work at least couple of days. Artisteer 3 is very nice software however themes still have some bugs which fixing them can be a pain, none of them are as worry free as good ol Garland theme (Drupal Default).... What you need to know is, even if you generate a theme with Artisteer, you still need to tweek it's CSS file one way or another but it really saves time. I really don't know why some people always want to do stuff the hard way because with Artisteer you'll be at least 80% ahead in your journey of creating a theme!