More Software Recommendations

I’ve been writing software for decades. For the first software products I published, I hand-wrote the HTML for the web-pages myself. Over the years, web-pages became better looking and more sophisticated. The specifications for HTML grew and grew and then they added CSS (cascading style sheets).

Eventually someone pointed out to me, my website was looking rather amateur and was letting my actual software product down. The software I write is written in C/C++ and I only had a rudimentary knowledge of HTML.

So what was I going to do? I didn’t want to pay someone else thousands of Euros to create a website for me. For one, I couldn’t easily afford the money and secondly I wanted to retain control. I wanted the ability to update the website, whenever I wanted and without having to deal with another person wanting to get paid for every time.

So I used the Open Source package Joomla to create a website for me. Well it look marginally better, but still it looked plain.

I found a product called Artisteer. It created a template for me. A template is something that makes a plain looking website, look cool and fancy i.e. it contains the colour scheme, the icons, the borders, the gradients, the styles etc.

Over the years, the company producing Artisteer created two other products. One is called Thelmer and the other Nicepage. I have never used Thelmer, but I have used Nicepage. Nicepage is a webpage and theme design tool. Artisteer is for creating themes for the older style of web-sites. Nicepage is meant for the latest style of websites i.e. longer web pages divided up into sections.

With Nicepage, you can add pre-made sections to a web-page and then customise them. To sections, you can add grids and contains. Nicepage can either create stand-alone web-pages for you or a zip file you can import into Joomla, that contains your menu, articles and theme.

Nicepage isn’t like WordPress. It needs a little more work and technicial knowledge, but if you are prepared to put a bit more effort in you can be rewarded with a unique looking website, where you can have exactly what you want.

For my software product I needed a pre-made features box. Nicepage provided it. I also needed professional looking icons. Nicepage provides lots and lots of those. You just type in keywords for your icons and pictures and Nicepage will bring up a selection for you. It will also recolour and change the style of the icons you select.

As of today (17th February 2019), Nicepage is recently released software.

The Journey Begins

I’ve recently published a Windows software application and I wanted to recommend some tools that helped me get the software in a form ready for the world to see! I am not affiliated with these companies in any way, but I was impressed with their software and I wanted to tell the world.

I can program in C/C++, but when I comes to graphics and design, I have far less ability. I used Axialis IconGenerator to create the icons used by my software application and also for the website where it is published.

Axialis’s website has a lot of so-called object packs for IconGenerator, which can be downloaded separately. I downloaded about seven of them. For the first iteration of my website, I practically used the graphics in the object packs as-is. Their objects are very high quality and in some cases, far higher than I’ve seen anywhere else.

However their software is much more than just reusing graphics. With IconGenerator you can combine individual, already created graphics, change colours, add text, add shapes, add special effects etc. Axialis also sell what they call lifetime software and so more rarely nowadays don’t charge you for keep using the software or for upgrades. I think they are to be commended for this!


Software Development Is Creativity – Kaira