We have purchased Artisteer and have created and implemented a Joomla template on this blog site. We are not a template club or template designers, per se. We have joined the clubs and purchased individual licenses over the years. We have heavily modified template club templates to make them "unique" to the client.

While I agree that it writes some unusual CSS, (non-standard module code) it does provide a great tool, for even a designer. Plus, we are considering replacing just module CSS code for our standard templates. You can create base designs and then modify those for each client. (vesrion 2.2 was released today and added support for module class suffixes) I did heavy modification to my template after I installed it. Just seems easier than going back to the Artisteer application. To me, designs keep getting simpler for SEO reasons and visual trends. So this tool lets us create our own template series without using the "suggested" designs from Artisteer. And it automates the process. And if we need more or different module positions, we will do that by hand. No problem.

I think that the designs from Rockettheme, Joomlart and others are amazing. We will certainly still have licenses for those. But with simpler designs, I see us using this tool. Especially Joomla and Wordpress blog sites. It still takes a fair bit of time to create and customize the template. But in the end, it will be worth it.

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