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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Sprache: Englisch
Designing good looking, professional quality web templates or building your own website are rather complicated tasks, demanding a lot of technical and graphical expertise. Artisteer has changed this situation, enabling you to do it by yourself, without the need to learn skills such as HTML, web-programming languages, or drawing."Creating stunning Templates with Artisteer" is a practical, step-by-step guide that will show you how you can prepare an elegant, professional looking website, on your own, using features of Artisteer. It also describes the process of designing templates for various popular CMS platforms like WordPress or Joomla!, by giving you practical hints, showing how to install those templates and how to import the content into CMS. "Creating stunning Templates with Artisteer" leads you through the process of designing a website, including all standard layout elements, from header to the footer, including menus and special boxes. You will learn how to prepare the templates, store them and export them in the form of ready-to-use HTML pages or packages that can be installed in various CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, or DotNetNuke. The last part of the book shows you some tips and tricks that allow you to extend standard themes generated by Artisteer for enriching the website with image gallery, combining two menus, and more.You will learn how to create a professional quality website or CMS template on your own, with the use of Artisteer with minimal technical difficulties.
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Seitenzahl: 204
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Creating Templates with Artisteer
Creating Templates with Artisteer
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: March 2013
Production Reference: 1120313
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84969-941-9
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Suresh Mogre (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Jakub Sanecki
Reviewer
Mark Conroy
Acquisition Editor
Mary Nadar
Commissioning Editor
Priyanka Shah
Technical Editors
Charmaine Pereira
Amit Ramadas
Copy Editors
Laxmi Subramanian
Ruta Waghmare
Project Coordinator
Sneha Modi
Proofreader
Martin Diver
Indexer
Monica Ajmera
Graphics
Aditi Gajjar
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Jakub Sanecki is an experienced web developer and programmer, with over 11 years of experience. He was born in 1977 in Poland. In 2001, right before graduation (he graduated in company management) he founded Fregata—a company where he works until today, and took up his true passion, information technology. Starting with providing services related to a popular ERP system, the company evolved in the direction of programming services and custom software development. With the increasing popularity of the Internet, it concentrated on web applications' and websites' development. Author of many web and desktop applications, Jakub works as an independent IT consultant and freelancer, realizing projects of various size and complexity, for companies of various sizes. He also provides training courses related to IT and web technologies and the techniques to use them in the company environment. For some years he worked as a university teacher, teaching web and desktop programming.
Fregata is an authorized reseller of Extensoft. You can visit www.szablonik.net, as it provides support and additional information about this software tool.
Privately, a husband and father of two children, Jakub lives with his family in Sosnowiec (in Poland), spending little moments of free time playing piano or reading books.
Acknowledgement
Almost every book starts with some words, in which the authors thank people who have supported him/her and allowed him/her to finish the writing of the book. Following this nice and proper tradition, I would also like to thank the people, without whom this book would not have come into existence. First of all, I would like to thank to my wife, Hania, who supported me all the time and forgave all my whims while I was writing, taking care of our home and our son, and forgiving me for spending less time with them.
I would like to thank my parents who bought me my first computers and who always took care and trusted in me, even if my decisions seemed controversial to them. Without their acceptance and trust, I couldn't have realized my passion and started to make a living by founding a small IT company.
I would like to thank the rest of my family and my friends, for their patience and understanding while I was writing, as I didn't find time to meet them.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the people from Packt Publishing, who gave me a chance to write this book and did a great job, spending a lot of their time and work by correcting my initial drafts and providing valuable suggestions. Without their experience, knowledge, and commitment, I wouldn't have been able to finish this project.
About the Reviewer
Mark Conroy is a web developer and public speaker based in Galway, Ireland. A former English teacher by profession, he began designing websites as a hobby for friends' bands and local community groups. Since his humble beginning with Adobe Dreamweaver, he has graduated to working, almost exclusively, with Drupal, embracing open source technology whenever possible. As a speaker, he mostly presents on uses of digital media for effective campaigning. He has also presented at Drupal for Government days in Dublin on creating social networks using Drupal. Mark is a co-organizer of the monthly Galway Drupal Meetup.
As a freelance developer working under the name A Design For Life—www.adesignforlife.net, Mark has worked on a number of large projects, not least of which was the redevelopment of the Ireland Reaching Out website (www.irelandxo.com) that he built single-handedly from the ground up, using a combination of Drupal Commons (and some extra contributed Drupal modules), Artisteer, CSS, and CiviCRM. All functionality on the site was completed using innovative approaches to pre-existing modules from drupal.org. He also built and continues to maintain the political campaigns and contacts website contact.ie, which has become the most popular online method for contacting politicians in Ireland.
This is the first technical book Mark has worked on. He has, however, published a textbook for English students, In Transition: An Anthology of Texts and Tasks for Transition Year Students, is awaiting publication of a second English textbook, and is about to start work on his third.
Mark is available for long and/or short-term freelance work, especially in the area of Drupal and campaign technologies. You can contact him at <[email protected]> or <[email protected]>.
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Preface
Designing good-looking, professional-quality web templates or building your own website is a complicated task. Artisteer has changed this situation, enabling anyone to do it by themselves, without the need to learn things such as HTML, web-programming languages, or drawing. Creating Templates with Artisteer is a practical, step-by-step guide that will show you how to prepare an elegant, professional-looking website on your own, using the features of Artisteer.
This book is great for enthusiasts, Artisteer users, and individuals who want to create professional-looking websites without paying for professional services, expensive tools, and also to speed up the work and automate time-consuming tasks.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Meet the Artisteer, helps you to learn what Artisteer exactly is and how it can be useful for you. We will familiarize you with the interface and some basic functions of the application. You will also prepare your very first template.
Chapter 2, The Template Step-by-Step, covers the typical process of designing with Artisteer, explaining all the typical elements of the template one by one. At the end of this chapter, you will be able to prepare your simple website all alone.
Chapter 3, CMS Templates, discusses advantages of using a content management system (CMS) over a static website, and how to use Artisteer for designing templates for such solutions. We will convert our example project into Joomla! and WordPress installable packages, and also import the content from Artisteer into CMS.
Chapter 4, Tips and Tricks, shows you some additional effects you can enrich your project with by slightly modifying the source code generated by the program.
What you need for this book
In order to appreciate this book completely, we recommend you to have Version 4 of Artisteer, which can be downloaded from http://www.artisteer.com/, and Notepad++, which can be downloaded from http://notepad-plus-plus.org/.
Who this book is for
This book is addressed to anyone wanting to build their private or company website on their own, without learning technical stuff such as HTML, CSS, or programming, and for professionals considering including Artisteer into their toolkit. It's also addressed to all the less-advanced Artisteer users, looking for a printed guide.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Edit the template.css file once again and append the following code at the end:"
A block of code is set as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Choose the Colors & Fonts tab on the ribbon.".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
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Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Errata
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Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Meet the Artisteer
In this book, you will see that you are able to design and prepare a professional-quality website template all alone, without anybody's help. You don't need to know how to draw or how to code. You don't need to worry about HTML, CSS, PHP, and all that complicated stuff. All you need is your copy of Artisteer.
You may ask, "What is Artisteer?"
What is Artisteer
Artisteer is an Automated Web Designer. What does it mean? In simple words, it's an application that lets you prepare great websites, even if you don't know anything about drawing, programming, web technology, and all that stuff. With Artisteer, you can design your website, fill it with content, and in the end, generate the ready-to-use HTML/CSS files that you can upload to your web server (in fact, this can also be done in Artisteer). You can also automatically generate any layout in the form of a template dedicated to one of several well-known CMS systems, such as Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, or DotNetNuke. The design process looks totally different in comparison to the traditional way in which it's usually done. While you still have a lot of control and can decide many aspects of your design, the drawing process is done automatically and doesn't demand any graphic skills from you, except a good eye for what looks good on a page. And it's fast. Indeed very, very fast.
Artisteer was the first application of its kind in the market and still remains one of the best tools in this category.
Artisteer versus other software tools
Because Artisteer is a new kind of tool, it is hard to give a proper definition of what it is. There are a lot of easier ways to say what Artisteer is not. This will allow us to avoid any confusion about what it should be compared with. If we consider the typical process of building a website, it usually consists of several stages as follows:
This allocation of tasks is of course quite hypothetical, and it may vary in particular teams and companies, but the goal was to show you the flow of the overall process. Sometimes the entire process is done by a single person, but in the case of bigger projects, it's not uncommon that every stage is realized by a group of people. Therefore, we're talking about a group of people (a team of various specialists) using different tools, such as graphics editors, WYSIWYG HTML editors, code editors, and so on.
The tools that are most similar to Artisteer are other web builder applications. The difference is in what you can change and set up. As I mentioned earlier, you can change almost everything in Artisteer.
Who can use Artisteer
So who is Artisteer dedicated to? The potential audience of this program is very large. I can't be sure, but I feel that the intention of Artisteer's creators was to create a tool that allows the nongraphic and nontechnician people to create complete and great-looking websites. This would place Artisteer as a tool for hobbyists and enthusiasts, but the scope of users is much larger. Let's consider this problem from several different points of view.
Hobbyists
A hobbyist is somebody who wants to have a website because of his/her private passion. It's not his/her job, it's not his/her business, he/she won't gain any money on it. It may be a private blog on Blogger or WordPress, or just a simple family website, often based on the cheapest hosting service possible. For such a person, hiring a professional web development company or freelancer is usually not an option because of the cost. Usually, the only available option is to try to prepare the page on his/her own (the results will be adequate to his/her skills), or to buy a ready-made template (accepting the fact that there are a lot of different websites that look the same). Artisteer gives such people a third option: buy the program and prepare a unique and good-looking site all alone. The cost will be less than the usual price for a ready-made, standard layout on the market.
Designers
A designer is an artistically talented person who can use the graphics editors and create good-looking designs for web pages. In a team, a designer usually does the first stage of work, creating an overall concept of how the site will look, and preparing the graphics. While a designer is good at drawing, he/she can't code. To create a website a designer needs the help of a web developer. But with Artisteer, he/she can design the template and enrich it with his/her own custom graphic elements, which he/she can prepare. He/she can even enter the content and transfer this all into a CMS skin, offering the end user a complete solution.
Web developers and programmers
The frontier that divides web developers and programmers is often very thin, and various companies use different names for the same jobs. In this book, we assume that a web developer is someone with the skills for creating HTML/CSS code. Additionally, he or she often has good knowledge of administrating the CMSs, can install and configure various extensions, and is able to prepare the whole website, including stylesheet modifications, as there's no requirement of individual programming. The programmers are usually "next-level web developers", with programming skills. Usually, they code the core of the CMS systems or its additional functionality (create extensions). In short, we can assume that a web developer is someone who builds websites using the things that a programmer codes.
