Sure, you can go purchase a premium theme, at a premium price. You can also wade through the huge number of free templates and hope that you don’t download one that has harmful code embedded, but why would you want to ?

Now there’s no reason to do either. With the release of Artisteer not long ago, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, CodePress and ASP.NET developing just got much easier and faster. With such an intuitive, easy to learn interface, and such powerful features, almost everyone can author beautiful themes/templates in only minutes. Before, you’d better know XHTML and CSS very well before even attempting what Artisteer makes so easy.

WordPress has become the platform of choice for many Internet Marketers, and that’s for different reasons. Obviously, the first thing that is very attractive, is that it’s free with any cpanel hosting account. Even so, a bad product is bad regardless of the price. WordPress is also popular because it is just a well designed, efficient, easy to use product. It was good from day one, and it gets better with every new version. The developers deserve all the accolades that they receive. Also, WordPress lends itself well to nearly any task. With the numerous plugins available you can have it do nearly everything you could possibly desire in a marketing website.

So, you’ve got a fantastic, free, versatile product in WordPress. It installs with just a few clicks using Fantastico Deluxe. What could make it any better ? Artisteer is the addition that you maybe didn’t even know was needed. I use to weigh the options of paying for a custom theme, buying a premium theme, or going from site to site looking for that free theme that was just right. Those days are over, I bought Artisteer and what used to take at least many hours, I can now do in minutes.

With a cool option to suggest ideas for your new theme, creativity isn’t even needed to create awesome themes and templates with Artisteer. If creativity was required, well, let’s just say I would be out of luck with this program. I have no creativity, but yet even I can produce great looking WordPress themes using Artisteer.

You’ve heard the saying, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ It’s true, and the first impression a visitor gets from any website that you develop, better be a good one immediately. If you have a horrible, ugly or confusing site, people aren’t going to stick around and give you a second chance to make that first impression. I’ve seen sites, even just a single sales page produce a staggering amount of money regularly, not because they necessarily offered the best information or product, but because they were so visually appealing and did offer something that immediately caught the visitor’s eye.

In closing, if you have WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, CodeCharge, ASP.NET or even other HTML sites, I would take a serious look at the Artisteer software. It isn’t about not having the skills to author your own themes and templates, it’s about efficiency, productivity, and being able to get your sites looking good in the quickest time possible.

Even if I could hand code all of my themes and templates, I still wouldn’t. Why ? Because there’s absolutely no reason to, at least for me. If you need some special script on the site you can always add that in, but why pay someone to create a custom theme just for a few lines of needed code ?

I haven’t included the many features of this great tool to make WordPress themes here intentionally, you can download the fully functional demo for free. The free demo is 100% operational in it’s design capabilities. When you download and install it you’ll know exactly what this piece of software is capable of. The completed themes and templates are watermarked however, so you’ll need to register the software should you decide to keep it, and you will decide to keep it, rest assured.

Artisteer is available in two versions, the Standard Edition does everything, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, CodeCharge, ASP.NET and of course it will let you export your theme or templates as fully validated (W3C) XHTML and CSS.

The Home and Academic version is all you’ll want if you do primarily WordPress, and HTML sites. I doubt I will ever use Joomla, Drupal, CodeCharge or ASP.NET, but obviously if I do change my mind I can always upgrade my current version of Artisteer.

Go have a look at Artisteer, I can just about guarantee that you’ll be as impressed as I was. I downloaded the demo and then bought the software literally within minutes. It is that good.

Read practical info about website traffic – this is your own guide.

Is Wordpress better than Blogger? The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

Here’s the comparison scale:

1. Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2. Customization And Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can be a pain in the ass. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating. With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform. The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS.

3. Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content. Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

4. Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic. As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

5. Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

About the Author

Gobala Krishnan is the author of Wordpress Adsense System, the unique beginner’s guide to building content-rich Adsense websites with Wordpress. You can download two free chapters of his book at this link.

This post was written with the permission from Gobala Krishnan, the Malaysian guru who created the Wordpress Adsense System that quarantee you make your first adsense dollar in 7 days!