Web/Blog Tools

Artisteer - Great Software For the Graphic Impaired To Build Stunning Blogs/Websites

Written by Robert Bacal |

You’re a small business. You want a website or blog that stands out from the crowd by being original and useful, and that showcases what you have to offer. What, no budget? Worse yet, no skills with coding? Worstest! No graphic design skills.

I’ve been there, almost. I can’t justify spending thousands of dollars for a web or blog developer, and even though I DO have the skills to design my own websites and have successfully done so (10 and counting), I just don’t have stellar design and graphic skills, let alone the time to do it without help. Besides, I’ve done it too often it’s not fun.

A Solution:

My solution was to take a look, and then use a rather amazing program called Artisteer. It allows you to create custom blogs for WordPress, Joomla and other blog platforms and also allows building websites. The entire process is point and click, no coding needed, and if you couple their technology with some semblance of good taste, you can develop YOUR site to reflect YOUR business.

You start by choosing one of the built in templates that appeals, and you can do no custom changes, or change almost anything. Don’t like the colors? Cycle through various color schemes at the touch of a button.

Want to include a graphic in the header? Not a problem. If you are doing a blog, you can set it up with only one column, two or three columns. Menus are all done for you and updated for blogs (it gets a bit trickier if you are doing websites).

It’s a rather extraordinary program, and one I’ve used to revamp a number of my sites.

Our Customer Service Zone blog was created using Artisteer, and this blog will soon be redone as soon as I can find a few spare hours (it’s that fast).

Our entire social media site – Socialmediabust.com, (the site you are on right now0 including both the website and the blog were done with Aristeer, and as you can see, it has a common look and feel across both blog and webpages.

Any limitations on these sites are from my own limitations as a graphic designer!

Cautions:

Now, a little reality check. If you have no technical ability at all with websites, you will have a problem. You still need to know how to upload the files the program creates, and how to work with them. It’s all basic stuff that anyone who works with Internet sites will know, but inexperienced business folks may have difficulties. After all, though, if you want an Internet presence you need to learn SOME things.

The other issue has to do with using Artisteer to do web pages. The code (the stuff underlying what you see in a browser) is complex and unwieldy and seems to result in slow page loading for visitors. That doesn’t apply to using it for blogs as much.

I found that I had to go in and use my coding skills to try to remove as much unnecessary stuff from the code as possible, but it was a challenge, certainly way beyond what the average business person could do. it’s not a deal breaker. You can still use the code as is, and it won’t be a huge problem.

If you are interested in more information just click on the graphic below.

Disclaimer: I am a happy user of this product, but I am also an affiliate and receive a very small commission for sales that go through links from our sites. Just so you know.

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Social Media Peril

MicroThoughts

The biggest peril facing social media users and businesses has to do with trust. Anyone can be anybody they choose in social media since there are no even close to adequate methods to verify identities. The peril lies with users who, after interacting with someone they think they know, will believe they know them well enough to trust them as if they had known them for a long time. It's a dangerous situation on many levels, and I wish social media proponents would start educating people as to the dangers. Even if a person is who they say, we have no idea of the vested interests and agendas, and that's one reason to verify anything important heard via social media.

Best Practices

You cannot copy another company and expect the same success they achieved in social media. Social media, and almost anything else, is about people, and since you don't have the people, tradition, culture or anything else that other companies have you have to develop a unique strategy and tactics to suit YOUR business. Unless you ARE Zappos, don't try doing what Zappos has done.

Engage:

One of the prime illusions for business using social media is that it appears that "customers" are engaged by the company. It's more accurate to say (if on Twitter) that people are engaged with Twitter, even if they are communicating with the company. In any case, the term is over-used and misleading.

Best Practices In Social Media? Fergetabatit

Most regular people don't have the time or inclination to read post after post, article after article telling us how to use social media to accomplish business goals. As a result most don't realize how poor and conflicting the advice is. For example, did you know that the key top business success in social media is content (how old fashioned)? No, wait. The next post on the same site says the key is relationship building one by one, while old Guy whatshisname says "No, no, it's all about the follower numbers, forget quality or relationships -- automate."

Is this significant? All the contradictions? You tell us. Who do you listen to? Is there any point to talking about best practices? Worse, could it be that they're all making things up?

SocialMediaBust