OverlookTechnology.com

Creating skins for DotNetNuke is a real pain in the ass.  Modifying someone else’s skins is a pain in some other parts – mostly the brain.  The skinning engine for DNN is a powerful one and while a talented designer/programmer can create some pretty amazing and flexible designs, the trouble is that most people are not talented at BOTH design and programming at the same time.  So unless you’re part of a big budget web design firm, you’re left to purchase a “store bought skin” from snowcovered or your favorite skin designer and then attempt to “tweak” their design to meet your specific needs.

We’ve probably purchased in the neighborhood of 25 skin packages from snowcovered over the years for various client projects.  I often take the really well constructed skins and re-use them over and over, changing images and CSS and layouts enough to feel good about design variation.

All of this takes time.  Lot’s of time and more often than not frustration as you chase CSS issues and layout problems to create even the more trivial of changes.

Enter Artisteer, a Windows Desktop application that can best be described as “MS Publisher meets DNN”.

Artisteer is the first and only Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates and blog themes. (from Artisteer.com)

Always one to try and take steps out of the process I recently tested Artisteer 2.2 (then immediately bought a copy).  Here’s why:

The Lowdown

So far, dealing with Artisteer has been great.  I purchase the application online for $130 USD through PayPal.  Licensing was smooth and easy and I had the trial unlocked about ten minutes after my purchase.

You do have to install their menu module before their skins will work.  No problem since SolPart is pretty bad and their menu is so flexible.

Support has been responsive and they are very open to product suggestions.  (One of my ideas for the libraries was added to the roadmap – sweet)

Their forums are organized – but a little clunky to use.  They seem to have a lot of Joomla and Drupal users to the DNN forum is a little light – but you can see more and more posts in their daily.

Most posts are answered by other users.  I suspect Artisteer deals with support tickets for any “real” support issues from paying customers.

Limitations

Artisteer does have it’s limitations in this release (first release with DNN support) Some of the limitations. 

• Content pane layout is good but limited.
• They don’t support all of the kin object (breadcrumbs is in the 2.3 beta)
• You can only export one Article and one Block (so two containers per skin)
• Some users reported issues with “Hide Menu” but it worked fine for me.
• The login and register links show up as nav items only
• There are a few minor styling bugs…nothing big
• Everything is CSS Layout based…no importing old skins
• All of their stylesheet conventions are prefixed with art_.

Examples.

Here are two sites I created using Artisteer:

www.overlooktechnology.com (this site) created while experimenting with Artisteer.  This is my first Aristeer skin.  I’ve since gone back and tweaked it a few times and created a News Article template to work with Artisteer.

www.naturallyhortons.com is a freelance project for a friend.  All I got was a business card with the colors, logo and chevron pattern.  I finished the skin itself in under an hour.  The rest of the site took about a half day.

Benefits

I think the biggest thing I like about this application is that you can create really nice looking skins quickly and easily.  More importantly, you can make tweaks quickly, see them in real time and upload your changes.

Basically it saves time and increases flexibility which should save your money (or increase your profits) and keep you and your clients smiling.