Create WordPress Themes

WordPress is fantastic for the extend to which is can be customised, however if mucking around with CSS isn’t something you really want to get into personally then here are a few tools to help you out:

Artisteer

Artisteer is a new application fresh out of beta which helps you design either normal websites or a WordPress theme. It’s also one of the few programs I’ve seen which uses the Office Ribbon UI, it works pretty effectively for this application and looks great as well.

The problem is that this isn’t freeware and costs $99.95 for a developer license. Considering the lack of advanced features in the software, however nice it looks, I can’t see many people jumping at the chance to purchase this.

Perhaps if it included an actual code editor as well or had a great deal more options for customisation then it would be a more attractive offer but till then I think not. If you use the free version all images are watermarked when you export your theme, however this could still be useful as you can simply replace the images in the files.

I can only assume the activation of Artisteer provides a lot more functionality such as more templates, support for more platforms and more options.

WordPress Theme Generator

Feels kind of dated compared to Artisteer but will do the basics of theme design for you, handy if you want something to work off but not much more than that.

Starkers WordPress Theme

I particularly like this. If you’ve ever started a new theme based off the default WordPress themes then you’ll have realised how much stuff is in there which you really don’t need. Naked WordPress theme is a completely stripped down theme for you to work off, really helpful =)

There’s an update saying it isn’t working too well with WP 2.6, but that the author is updating it soon =)