I have recently been trying out the excellent Artisteer template builder from Extensoft, Inc: http://www.artisteer.com/
 
This software allows the user to quickly and easily create designs that can then be exported as WordPress, Blogger, Joomla!, Drupal, DotNet, ASP or XHTML/CSS templates. You can control nearly every aspect of style and layout without knowing any html or css and the software lets you preview all changes in near-real-time. Plus, as I learned in reading their forums, "Artisteer generates lean and clean template code which other similar tools simply do not." That is a very big deal when it comes to later modifying templates, not to mention SEO issues.
 
What I would really love to see is something similar to this system to help end users who are not codies to create their own ViArt templates quickly and easily. Building such a system from scratch would be a huge, task so I am suggesting that ViArt collaborate directly with the folks at Extensoft to make their system able to generate ViArt 3.7+ templates. This would be a huge advantage to ViArt and would put them ahead of the pack.
 
Could you check this out, Tony and staff?
 
Thanks!

I m agree with you organicman. Viart is one of the best ecommerce software so far but there are few very important things which they don't develop since for long time. Viart hasn 't got a good tamplate selection to purchase at all. They all looks the same.If it was possible to implament other tamplates (wordpress, joomla and other xhtml based theplates) to viart people would go for it and almost everyone would prefer viart when there is a toons of skin option.
What i expext from a good cms software is, enoghf tamplate option or tamplate editing option, w3 standarts clean coded cms, language options (seo friendly) and SEO friendly pages.

has anyone used this artisteer software to create a viart template? we are needing a different look and i'm getting concerned that we won't be able to figure out make viart look the way we want...

I used artisteer for joomla sites and is very easy to use. If this could work for Viart templates it would be a very usefull tool for me and my clients.
I've been lookling for something like artisteer for Viart, but it seems there is nothing out there. Does anyone have an other idee?

How about starting with CSS template design? That would go a long way towards a customizing feature. Basic HTML editing can do the fundamental layout, and you can use most any tool for that, then CSS can do the rest.