Making WP themes?

SO, from what I read on here, Artisteer is pretty good and newb friendly for setting up my own WP themes for my blogs

I basically want something thats easy to use for a newb and I am looking to use graphics in the header, an dmaybe footer and background too.

Is artisteer the way to go? any other suggestions?

Artisteer is very easy to use and has a nice user interface BUT the code it generates is not that good at all in terms of on page optimization.

other then that its really good.

I have used Artisteer in the past when I was lazy to create my own themes ...

It does the job for what you have explained you want to do.

But the program has big issues in a matter of SEO ...

But if you are willing to do your own theme, I`d suggests Firefox, Firebug, Notepad ++.

The best and most easy way to customize and optimize your wordpress themes ... !

I'm using this quiet often whenever I need a unique, yet easy theme:
http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/

the default wp theme is a pretty good place to start - its so simple on purpose. very quick and easy to remove the junk you dont want so you can see the wp funcs that you need in a standard theme etc.

this is in fact what i did when i wanted my own cms to support wp themes - i just ripped some existing themes apart - much quicker than trying to find all the info on the wp codex.

Artisteer is a good program, but it's still important to know the boring details of how things work behind the scenes.

Generally speaking the words 'newb' and 'wordpress theme developer' do not fit together very nicely, so at the very least, you should probably skim through

yah; artiseer is very easy to use and you can make theme of you own style with just drag and drop. must try the trial version before go.

I used Artisteer and was pretty unsatisfied with it. All you really need to know is how css works and some html to create a wordpress theme. I don't know hardly a lick of php and I find myself constantly ripping apart a theme I kind of like and then completely ripping it apart and tweaking it to the way I want it to be.

Definitely get notepad++ though.

also get the developers addon for firefox. It will show you all the names of the div tags so you understand what it is you're modifying and which style it's associated with.

Also understand this code <!-- start here --> <!-- end here --> that will help you when you want to look at the source code and figure out code is going where and which .php file holds the code you want to play with.