I’ve been designing websites for a few years now, from personal pages, to CMS sites for schools and corporate pages for clients.  I’ve used lots of sofware over the years, from Dreamweaver to StyleMaster and so on.  They all help enormously but ultimately, to get the site finished, you end up hand coding CSS style sheets and creating your own artwork.  I’ve resorted to using templates from various online template stores, but often these end up looking generic or not fit for purpose.  And you end up changing them that much to make them unique that often its easier to start from scratch.
The, I cam across a review of a new piece of software, in PC Pro, on sale now.  The software is called Artisteer and having downloaded and played with the demo, I’ve been left that impressed I’ve taken the plunge and bought the full package.

This software is seriously brilliant for any web designer and I guarantee will save hours.  It starts of by suggesting themes for you and if this sounds weird or limiting then I suggest you try it for yourself.  Once you settle on a theme, you can go about changing any aspect of that theme, be it header, footer, layout, etc etc, all by a fantastic GUI and not a style sheet in sight.  To make things even more awesome, the standard package allows you to export your carefully crafted template to Wordpress, Joomla, DotNetNuke or even Drupal.

I’ve only been working with Artisteer for a few hours but I’ve seen enough to make me realise that this could change the lives for many web designers, or even amateurs who want to design their own site but don’t know where to start.
Artisteer gets my vote for software of the year.

*****UPDATE*******

Artisteer now also creates templates for Blogger too.