MikeT
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I find your software very useful for web noobs. After playing with several editors/design tools, I was able to get the results (design of a template) that I wanted in a much shorter time than it took me with anything else.
I still have a long learning curve ahead for fleshing out the content of a website with Wordpress, but the template provides me with a much more advanced set of components and code that would have taken me weeks to develop via trial and error.
I hope you design more functionality into your product for web developers who are just starting out, but who over time will want more advanced capabilities.
My pesos for registration is on the way.
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MikeT
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Now that I've got my template designed and tweeked, my recommendation to Artisteer is that you need to expand the focus of your documentation. The software is actually quite intuitive and I hardly had to refer to the documentation to get my first template up and going.
But noobs like myself begin to encounter problems when beginning to use the template inside of Wordpress. To help in that transition, I suggest 1. a simple guide on the basic .php files and what they do and decent comments in the files, 2. basic next steps for getting your template up and going. Judging from forum posts others have encountered the same initial questionss that I did (mysterious home page in menu, disappearing widgets when adding new ones, etc.). Most of these are pretty simple fixes but probably can be avoided with a basic guide. It seems that this is where you begin to start losing customers.
Using your forum and Wordpress forums have been helpful beyond the basic documentation, but because of so many version changes, sometimes posted solutions are not the best solutions - even when posted by your forum gurus. LOL ... I spent an hour searching for a line of code in a .php file only to realize the forum post was referring to an old version of Wordpress and that line was now in a different file.
Perhaps you might think that this is a Wordpress problem and not yours. If that is the case, I think that is a flawed business model. Savvy users will love your product and are probably an easy sell. Us noobs who have some tech knowledge but know little about web design, css, html, etc. - might be the market you want to concentrate on. If you want to expand your market to catch the real noobs with little tech savvy, you probably want to concentrate on the how to's to get them up and going with Wordpress, templates, and basic coding.
With a little effort, I think you could expand your market.
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Lance
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I agree that their documentation could be improved and I have found areas i the user manual that are not current, but I expect they will resolve that soon enough.
That aside I must respectfully disagree with you. They have the perfect business model it seems for their product. It does exactly what they say it does so any "noob" can have a template done and uploaded in very short order. Actually I think it may be great for those who are not tech savvy who want to learn more about coding as well. I mean the first thing most may ask is "How do I get rid of that Artisteer link!". Welcome into the world of coding, which is not always just a cut and paste job BTW.
For any new developer just starting out, good luck making a WordPress template from scratch. It takes even experienced coders days of writing and testing to build one. Sure, you can always grab a free template, but you still most often have to dig into it and it is never truly "yours" though.
I bought this program to cut down on the front end time of laying things out across the theme or template. I was expecting to have to still dig in and make changes. But for a simple site this product seems like it will save me some time overall. I am now in the process of learning how it outputs code and will then prepare my own code snippets as needed to replace generated code. This is something new developers should be thinking about doing and start working on if they are serious about being more than some fly by night company. A developer will not have clients very long if that's how they operate. This will hold especially true for developers that use a platform like Joomla or WordPress.
Everyone has to start out on the ground floor, Artisteer simply gives new developers a chance to focus on the code within their chosen CMS rather than their templates. So, it may actually fit perfectly into that niche.
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MikeT
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From a customer perspective: here's what I had to do to change the color and font size of the "read more" function.
1. search the Artisteer manual - nope, not built into Artisteer (15 mins)
2. search the Wordpress manuals - aha, some clues but not enough (1 hour) definitely not stylable from by simply clicking a button
3. search the web for solutions - argh not smart enough to do a good search, read a lot of useless sites just wanting me to click their stupid ads (1 hour)
4. search Artisteer/Wordpress forums - argh, so many different versions and so many unanswered posts, but aha found a little bit of code for changing the readmore font style to bold (1 hour)
5. search style.php for relevant code - nope, it's not a style (5 minutes)
6. search other .php files for relevant code - aha ... it's in the index file (30 minutes)
7. ok let's learn some code for font size and color - (5 minutes) - jeez that's simple, is that all there is to it?
8. insert code and test and debug/refine - (10 minutes) - woopie ... I now can change code for this basic feature
Summary: learning the appropriate code - 5 minutes. Modifying the code and website - 10 minutes. Learning how the application uses that code - about 4 hours.
Simple fix: insert in documentation or faq (it's okay to take the position that you are not here to support Wordpress and limit it to the most basic and consistent type of simple functional things)
> modifying read more - NNN.php file, change line XX: abba dabba doo (wordpress v2.71)
> options available - text color, text style, text size
> cautions - is called by function XXX and used to do YYY elsewhere
Customer service. Customer service. Customer service. Noobs will love you for it!!! I'm only taking time to critique because I think you have a good product and deserve to survive and make money off it.
Alternately, one of you gurus, plx make a good site with helpful keys focusing on how to take the Artisteer template and convert into Wordpress functionality. I promise I will click your stupid ads.
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Lance
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Mike, thanks for giving me a good laugh this afternoon with the "I promise I will click your stupid ads" line. I understand what you are saying here and do not disagree. The only problem they would then have is that after Drupal or such changes where or how things are coded, their documentation is once more quickly out of date. Although this does not happen real often it can be a bit of a double edged sword for them. The changes made between Joomla 1.0.x and 1.5.x are a good example of this I suppose. Only having had the product for a couple of days now I must say that in some cases the code it puts out is interesting to say the least. It will take a lot of time for me to figure out how to deal with some of that. Hopefully if that user group site actually gets going, especially the forum, people will start sharing more there and I'm sure some developers will share as well. I suppose we will have to see how this community develops in those regards for now.
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Marc Smith
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The documentation is relatively adequate. It cerainly can't cover all of the CSS that is generated since there are lots of differences between HTML and Wordpress and Drupal and Joomla.
Now, the 'read more' functionality has nothing to do with Artisteer. That is part of Wordpress, and it's not well documented there? So, if I undersand correctly, the Artisteer documentation should reflect a function that itself doesn't offer an option for, but tell you how to modify the CSS for that function? It's an interesting propsal, but my thought is that if it's not an Artisteer function, asking here in the forum is the best place to go for that kind of information.
There are several members well versed in that type of info that would be able to help you... and I am sure they would in pretty short order.
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