Posts Tagged ‘WordPress Theme Design Software’

After catching up on my sleep after traveling back all night from Boston from one of the largest wordcamps that I have attended to date, I finally got around to editing and uploading some basic video I took.  The first video is a quick presentation i gave during an unconference session, showing people how to design their first wordpress theme using the software that makes it easy, Artisteer.

Videos of the WP theme design presentation in 3 parts

Update – Part 3 is now fixed and working

Getting setup and going with the presentation was a little haphazard so the presentation wasn’t as polished as similar versions I delivered in Birmingham, Las Vegas and Savannah, but the audience had a lot of good questions, and I didn’t mind the change up.  It actually helped me quite a bit get a better feeling for those areas of the presentation that are probably more important for people learning to design WP themes for the first time.

Brett Bumeter of Softduit Media joined a large group of attendees and presenters at Barcamp Chattanooga at Chattanooga State Community College.  Brett kicked off one of the first sessions by demonstrating how to create a WordPress theme in 10 minutes with no web design or PHP experience.

This was a live demo of Artisteer for both PCs & Macs and neither video nor slides were available from the actual event, but people can view are in depth video from a WordPress meetup in Charlotte covering WordPress Theme design for people of any skill level from novice to advanced.

Barcamp Chattanooga was a lively and busy event with close to 100 people registering for the event.  Chattanooga is rather unique as a city that has an extremely high percentage of citizen twitter users as well, so this strong turnout for a first year event was probably not a surprise for local visitors. 

People travelled from Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham and of course Softduit Media’s Brett Bumeter travelled in from Charlotte NC about 5 and a half hours away by car.

Chattanooga will also be the location of a future Palm Pre development meetup and Birmingham will host the next WordCamp in the SouthEast at the end of September with attendance currently projected between 150-250 people.

Pictures from Barcamp Chattanooga

Since November of 2008, PC User’s have benefited from the WordPress Theme Generator called Artisteer and now that WordPress Generator desktop application is available for Apple / Mac users.  The initial Mac beta was just released and people that purchase/have purchased a PC license will also have the ability to use the license on a Mac or vice versa on a PC.
I have been giving demonstrations of WordPress as a Content Management System for several months which includes a demo of Artisteer and the first question that is always asked is, “Does Artisteer work on a Mac?”

Now the answer is YES!  Artisteer does work on Macs.

Better yet, existing Artisteer users already know that when you purchase a license, that license will receive free upgrades for a year.  I have personally created almost 100 WordPress themes since purchasing Artisteer last fall, and I have significantly benefited from many many upgrades to the software.  This latest upgrade ads more Avatar support for WordPress, ads support for Dot Net Nuke and past upgrades provided support for Joomla & Drupal templates and much much more.

here’s the latest news release from Artisteer about the Mex Mac Capability

UPDATE – the Mac VErsion of Artisteer is now available in RC 2.3.  If you have already purchased Artisteer, your upgrades are free for a year! 

Artisteer for Mac (Beta) has arrived!
Artisteer 2.2 for Mac (Beta) is now available by clicking here. Couple interesting facts:

• Artisteer for Mac joins the family of products based on cross-platform .NET framework known as Mono.
• Artisteer might be the first product for Mac OS utilizing the ribbon interface first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows.

Technical notes and known issues for beta testers:

• Artisteer for Mac runs on Intel based hardware with OS X version 10.5 (Leopard).
• Artisteer for Mac requires X11 which is usually installed by default on OS X 10.5.
• Artisteer may require approx 1 minute to start the first time after installation.
• The “Open” and “Save” dialogs display Windows style folder structure and may require additional navigation to desired Mac folders.
• The top Mac menu bar does not offer an option to quit Artisteer. Use the Artisteer menu, keyboard shortcut ‘Command’+'Q’, or the red window close button to quit.
• Keyboard shortcuts stop working after clicking anywhere within the web design preview area.
• Certain amount of instability and limitations (as above) are expected due to limitations of the current Mono framework 2.4.
• There is a slight chance that your Mac computer may freeze when using Artisteer (this happened once in our tests). Please save all your work often in case you need to reboot your computer.

Customers who purchased an Artisteer license can use it on both PC and Mac computers (one each) during the beta period. An official release date of the Mac version will be planned after receiving detailed  issue reports from our beta testers and determining how much work is needed to resolve those issues.
Please send feedback and report reproducible issues to our support via the Contact Us page.

Artisteer version 2.2 update
We are releasing a new update to Artisteer 2.2 to resolve a few recent issues reported in the previous version 2.2 Beta.

• Artisteer: Added “Options” button in the export dialog.
• Artisteer: Added DotNetNuke Skin export announced below.
• Artisteer: Fixed a bug with the font size being altered by changing Articles -> Line Height.
• WordPress: Improved compatibility with Avatar List plugin.
• Joomla: Resolved custom footer not showing up.
• Joomla: Resolved centered menus not shown correctly.
• Joomla: Resolved a problem with the text “‘30′, ‘height’ => ‘30′ near h2″ showing on some pages.
• Joomla: Fixed incorrect path to spacer.gif in script.js file in Joomla templates.
• Drupal: Fixed an issue with broken image appearing instead of a logo uploaded in Drupal.

The new version 2.2.0.17297 can be obtained by clicking here and may become the officially released version 2.2 after additional testing.

This is quick list of seo plugins for wordpress.  It is an addendum to go with my fast speech at WordCampRDU 2009.

In addition to the plugins below, I used Artisteer 2.0 and highly recommend that program (does have a free trial download offer)

SEO Plugin List

• Sitemaps for visitors PS AutoSitemap -  ps-auto-sitemap
• XML Sitemap – sitemaps for bots – if setting up WP for a CMS set a higher priority for pages as opposed to posts (especially if you will only rarely updated posts – Essential SEO Plugin – wordpress-sitemap-plugin-set-it-right-for-maximum-seo-benefits
• Redirection – redirection
• Akismet – Its obvious but essential for small business
• Search Everything – enables searches of pages, not just posts
• All in one seo – Or HeadSpace or a couple others that include all in one
• Exec PHP – exec-php lets you install php code in content sections of your site – Essential SEO Plugin -
• PageMash – Pagemash
• Add the Multi-Level Navigation Plugin (son of suckerfish) -  multi-level-navigation-plugin
• Multiple Widgets – From time to time, you need to run different sidebars on different pages, so you will need to configure many multiple sidebars, which might require using the same widget on more than one sidebar, you’ll need the Multiple Widgets Plugin

Presentation file from WordPress as a CMS by Brett Bumeter – zipped MindManager Mindmap -

Presentation file from WordPress as a CMS by Brett Bumeter – PDF Copy

Brett Bumeter of Softduit Media will be speaking at WordCamp RDU (Raleigh Durham) 2009 on June 13th.  He will be covering an advanced topic on utilizing WordPress as a CMS for businesses.

Softduit Media has worked for several years to help both bloggers and small companies harness the power of WordPress as a CMS not only in the Charlotte area, but in Atlanta, and around the world. 

The SEO powers of WordPress that deliver traffic to a site combined with the super easy administration panel of the WordPress system make it very easy for companies to take control of their own websites handing the keys to the business users of the sites and freeing up expenses and resources from long term web consultants.   Brett has led the charge in Softduit to provide affordable websites that almost anyone in an organization can manage regardless of their experience in web design.

Brett will also be speaking at WordCamp Birmingham in September.

For other WordCamp events in the South or SouthEast you might also consider checking out WordCampHSV (Huntsville) & WordCamp Dallas, which looks like it will be an excellent event.  WordCamp CLT (Charlotte) will be later next winter in either November or December.