ASP.NET Web Design Software

May 2009
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Apr		Jun »
	1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

May 26th, 2009 |

Author: Dave

land-0123 What if there was a product that would allow you to create your web site themes as easy as you could create a PowerPoint presentation theme? Wouldn’t that be cool?

This past weekend I discovered just such a product. At first, I was pretty skeptical. I mean, I normally pay $50.00 or so per theme when I put up a DotNetNuke site and here is a product that will let me create very nice themes that I can use in BOTH my ASP.NET based sites AND my WordPress based sites for just over 3 times that price.

How I found it

This past weekend I spent some time reading and watching training videos. One of the training videos I watched was a product called “Marketing On The Fringe”

This product demonstrates how to use automated blogs to attract visitors to OTHER sites (of your own or affiliate sites). A little toward the black hat side of Internet marketing, but better to know how to do something and decide not to than to not know and therefore never have the choice. This is to say, just because I read the course, does not mean I’ve implemented what I’ve been taught, although I will say that I learned a ton that is just plain useful information. Well worth the price.

Why you might not even know about it

I think I’ve mentioned before that I am not a .NET-only programmer. I use what works. But if you’ve been stuck in the .NET world only, you may have never come across this piece of software because they market it to the PHP world primarily. That is, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

However, the product clearly states that it ALSO works for ASP.NET applications if you purchase the standard edition.

From their web site:

Version	Home & Academic Edition	Standard Edition
Free upgrades for 1 year
Design Suggestions
Design Features
Export as XHTML+CSS
Export as Wordpress Theme
Export as Joomla 1.5 Template
Export as Drupal 5/6 Theme
Export as ASP.NET Application
Export to CodeCharge Studio
Custom Value Dialogs (screenshot)
Library of Textures, Glares and Gradients	partial (75%)
Number of Color and Font Schemes	50+	70+
Number of Photo Objects	200+	300+

As soon as I saw this I thought, “if it even works a little bit, I’ve got to have it!”

So? Is it any good?

All I can say is, “WOW!”

This is as close as it gets to WYSIWYG theme creation.

I was a little concerned with just how this tool would export to ASP.NET since they are obviously PHP programmers and probably aren’t familiar with ASP.NET’s preferred way of doing things. But I was happily surprised when I discovered that what they do output can easily be adjusted.

Here’s what you can expect

Once you have your theme created you will export it as an ASP.NET application into a directory. What they will export is an ASP.NET 2.0 application. However the files can be used in ASP.NET 3.5 without any issues.

All of the files will be placed in the application root directory. The CSS files, the image directory, and a couple user controls. There is a master page in the “design” folder where the CSS link elements are included.

The other thing you’ll notice is that the menus are hard coded. If you want to use the menu control, you’ll probably want to do a little tweaking of the code.

The final bit of quirkiness you’ll need to deal with is that they create a separate stylesheet for IE6 and IE7. There are several ways you might deal with this issue. The easiest is to write code that detects the browser and removes one or both of them depending on the browser that was found. Since this is a product review, I’ll leave exactly how to do that for a future post.

So, what’s the product name?

Artisteer. Click the banner below to go to their site.

Ads by Lake Quincy Media

Other Related Items:

CANSEI DE SER SEXYMove over bossa nova! There's a new beat coming out of Brazil in the form of Cansei de Ser Sexy (Portuguese for "Tired of Being So Sexy"), and it's ra... Read More >

DonkeyBrazil's CSS release their follow-up to 2006's "Cansei de Ser Sexy" ("I got tired of being sexy"). They've toured worldwide a number of times with the... Read More >

Acer T230H bmidh 23-Inch Wide Touch Screen Display - BlackPresenting the Acer TouchScreen display - T230H is Acer's first touch-activated display solution offering fantastic touch-enabled possibilities made a... Read More >

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!