Overview
What started as two designers exploring a new CMS platform evolved into a full-scale product ecosystem: a recurring membership platform, a proprietary template framework, community support systems, documentation and training infrastructure, affiliate programs, service offerings, and a developer marketplace. We eventually sold the company to JoomlArt.
Most importantly, Shape5 gave me firsthand experience in product design at scale during one of the most formative periods in modern web development.
End-to-end ownership spanning product strategy, UX, visual design, front-end implementation, framework architecture, and community systems — across 11 years and 250+ shipped products.
THE OPPORTUNITY
CMS platforms were exploding in popularity — and a clear market was emerging around premium themes and plugins. Two designers with no funding, no VC, and no team decided to build one of the largest Joomla product ecosystems in the world.
The Origin
Joomla and WordPress were neck-and-neck ramping up in popularity. WordPress was primarily known as a blogging platform, while Joomla positioned itself as a far more capable and enterprise-ready CMS. My business partner and I had spent years building static HTML websites, so discovering Joomla felt transformative. Suddenly websites could be dynamic, modular, and extensible.
One night we got together and analyzed the business model of Joomla template companies. We looked at subscription pricing, estimated user counts, and realized there was a major opportunity emerging around premium CMS products. We were not solving a unique market gap at the time; we simply recognized the momentum of the ecosystem and committed early. In hindsight, it was the perfect moment to enter the market.
We initially tried outsourcing development. This quickly failed. Coders delivered poor results, missed deadlines, or didn't deliver at all. We pivoted fast: taught ourselves PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and CMS architecture from scratch. That ownership of the full stack changed everything.
It also shaped how I think about product design today: strong UX decisions are inseparable from implementation realities.
Shape5 officially launched in May 2007. We released one free template and one paid template on day one. The free product strategy accelerated growth immediately. Within six months, the company had grown enough for me to leave my full-time position as Team Lead at Witmer Public Safety and focus on Shape5 full time. The timing aligned perfectly with the explosive growth of CMS-driven web development. Over the following years we expanded aggressively across both Joomla and WordPress.
The S5 Image and Content Fader Extension
The Brand
Naming the company became an important early strategic decision. Many Joomla businesses included “Joomla” directly in their branding, but we intentionally avoided platform-specific naming. We wanted the flexibility to expand beyond a single CMS ecosystem if needed. We landed on the name Shape5, a name I had previously used for a personal project. Our early positioning centered around three core principles that helped us build trust and gain traction:
The free products became one of the most effective acquisition channels we ever built. Users downloaded free templates and plugins, joined our mailing list, interacted with support forums, and eventually converted into paid members.
We spent enormous amounts of time helping users directly in our forums, including users of our free products. This built trust and exposed potential customers to the quality of our products and support.
We invested heavily in reducing friction throughout the user journey. Over time, I learned that successful products were not just about design and features, good UX was the reduction of friction across the entire product experience.
Early name and logo explorations — we went through several candidates including "Gator Theme" and others with "Joomla" in the name before landing on Shape5.
One of the biggest predictors of success wasn't our product, pricing, or marketing—it was the partnership itself. Over 11 years we rarely experienced significant conflict because we shared the same goal: building the best company we could. Looking back, the strength of that partnership was one of the biggest reasons Shape5 succeeded.
Skills can be learned, but trust, communication style, and shared motivation are much harder to find.
Designing & Shipping at Scale
One of the biggest operational challenges was cadence. We operated on a relentless monthly product release cycle. One template every 30 days, for 11 years. Each release required designing, developing, testing, documenting, marketing, and supporting a production-quality product. Here are the two biggest things we did to help ease this load:
Vertex Framework
Problem
As the company matured, the complexity of our products and difficulty shipping every 30 days on time increased significantly. Maintaining dozens and eventually hundreds of templates independently became increasingly difficult.
Solution
We built Vertex, an upgradeable framework that standardized the architecture behind every template we shipped. Shared features and components could be reused across products and improved over time. Older templates inherited new functionality through framework updates, extending product longevity and reducing maintenance overhead. Vertex became foundational to scaling the business.
Impact
Reduced Maintenance Overhead
Scalable Design System
Improved Product Longevity
Framework-Powered Updates
Reusable Product Architecture
Faster Release Cycles
Backend Admin UI
Release Ownership
Problem
Early on, co-designing every template created friction, diluted creative vision, and slowed overall output pace.
Solution
We adapted by taking full ownership of alternating releases, one month each. This gave both of us uninterrupted creative control and a recovery cycle between the intense 30-day build sprints.
Impact
Reduced Design Friction
Clear Creative Ownership
Greater Design Diversity
Sustainable Release Cadence
Faster Decision Making
Even then, there was never true downtime. The pace was intense requiring many late nights, but it taught me how to operate inside fast-moving product environments while balancing design, engineering, support, and business priorities simultaneously. Outside of release schedules we were simultaneously managing:
Beyond templates, we shipped 33 paid Joomla extensions, 15 paid WordPress plugins, and 28 free products, building a full component ecosystem around the membership.
Over the course of 11 years, we designed through every major web design era, table-based layouts to CSS3, skeuomorphic to flat/material, desktop-only to fully responsive. Each template reflected the current best practices and trends of its time, making the catalog a decade-long design record.
Glass buttons, beveled navbars, heavy drop shadows. Desktop only. Slicing PSDs to HTML by hand.
Gradients, transitions, border-radius. Built our own S5 Effects JS library. Rich animations land in browsers.
Smartphones reshape expectations. Every template gets rebuilt with fluid grids, media queries, and touch-first UX.
Clean type, card-based UI, bold accent colors. jQuery replaces S5 Effects. Full WordPress catalog at scale.
Product Strategy
Our business model revolved around recurring memberships. Instead of selling individual templates only, we built a subscription ecosystem around access, support, updates, training, and developer tooling. We structured the memberships intentionally around customer maturity.
We intentionally structured pricing to guide most users toward our annual membership, as it delivered the best balance of value for customers and recurring revenue for the business. The tiers were designed so that the 12-month plan became the natural choice for most users. This tiering strategy created clear upgrade paths, strong recurring revenue, higher average customer value, and incentives for ecosystem participation.
- Unlimited product access
- Support included
- Source files & PSDs
- 10% renewal discount
For individual users who needed short-term access to products and support.
- Everything in Basic
- Training videos
- Club templates & extensions
- 20% renewal discount
Our primary annual membership focused on freelancers and growing businesses.
- Client site usage
- Hire a Coder bidding
- Member bonuses & partner perks
- 30% renewal discount
Our B2B level, designed for agencies and professionals building client websites at scale.
BEYOND THE TEMPLATE
Templates and extensions were the core product but we built an ecosystem around them that made memberships worth more than just templates alone. Shape5 became a platform and community around building websites.
Templates and extensions were the core product but we built an ecosystem around them that made memberships worth more than just templates alone.
Developer Tier FeatureHire a Coder Marketplace
Developer members could bid on custom projects, turning Shape5 into a talent marketplace. Only active $299 members could bid, ensuring quality
A lightweight in-house ecommerce section offering Site Shaper installs ($49), layout customizations ($79), custom color schemes ($199), and open-ended project quotes. This grew into a freelance pipeline that generated significant side revenue beyond memberships.
We cross-partnered with 18+ Joomla ecosystem companies — SiteGround, JoomUnited, Moz, HikaShop, JomSocial, and others, offering exclusive discounts to active members. This made the membership feel like a premium network, not just a download pass.
Docs, Tutorials & Knowledge Base
Full documentation for every product guides, FAQs, framework walkthroughs, and YouTube tutorials. Reduced support load and became a key SEO asset.
Growth Engine
No VC. No paid acquisition team. Growth came from a disciplined, multi-channel strategy built on free products, affiliates, community presence, ecosystem news sites, platform listings, and email.
We released 21 free Joomla extensions, 7 free WordPress plugins, 5 free Joomla templates, and 3 free WordPress themes.
These products generated enormous inbound traffic and email signups. Users entered the ecosystem through free products, experienced our support and product quality firsthand, and later upgraded into paid memberships.
Our affiliate program via iDevAffiliate was one of the largest contributors to revenue. It drove roughly one-quarter to one-third of monthly revenue.
Combined with placements on 15+ Joomla news and directory sites — joomla.org, joomlahacks.com, bestofjoomla.com and more — each monthly release created an organic SEO and traffic surge.
Monthly release emails drove consistent traffic. Sale emails occasionally produced days with 400%+ above average revenue — our highest-performing single marketing channel on a per-send basis.
The Joomla ecosystem included a large number of news and release sites that amplified product launches every month. In addition, every extension we built was submitted to the official Joomla extension directory, which became another major acquisition channel.
We ran banner ads on relevant sites. Facebook ads at $500/day targeting showed poor ROI even with targeting — we cut them early. A lesson in channel-fit over spend.
In the later years we listed templates on ThemeForest.net, tapping into a broader WordPress-first audience and adding a secondary revenue channel outside our membership model.
Challenges &
Hard-Won Lessons
Lesson
Without that two-day-old backup, the company would not have survived. From that point on, infrastructure and security became first-class priorities.
Lesson
Building on another platform means inheriting its risks. Decline happened gradually, which gave us time to act strategically rather than emotionally.
Lesson
Remaining competitive required constant learning and reinvention. The products that survived weren't the most feature-rich, they were the most adaptable.
Lesson
We learned that hiring quality wasn’t just about people, it was about process. Clear documentation dramatically reduced rework and improved outcomes.
Lesson
Alternating ownership removed creative friction, increased output speed, and created greater design diversity across the product line, while allowing recovery between monthly release cycles.
SELECT TEMPLATES
A curated selection of templates designed over a decade at Shape5. The full library spans 250+ commercial and free releases.
Photography
Minimal full-bleed portfolio with dark aesthetic, gallery and custom extension to favorite images throughout the site.
Live View
Spa & Massage
Elegant calming design for wellness businesses with soft tones and a mini eCommerce store.
Live View
Tourism
Vibrant template for tourism and venues with bold imagery and mini event system.
Live View
Restaurant
Appetizing restaurant design with beautiful menu layouts and warm atmosphere. Included a mini cart to order items.
Live View
Business
Sleek corporate template with strong typography and professional aesthetic.
Live View
eCommerce
Conversion-focused ecommerce theme with clean product grids and powered by VirtueMart.
Live View
Religious
Modern layout, bold typography and welcoming design for faith-based organizations with event and sermon sections.
Live View
University
Clean, structured layout designed for universities and educational institutions with events, departments, and campus news sections.
Live View
THE DEFINING PRODUCT LESSON
The products that win are often the products that are easiest to adopt, easiest to maintain, and easiest to build momentum around. I watched this play out over a decade in real time.
Why We Sold
Over time, WordPress dramatically overtook Joomla in adoption. Joomla was arguably the superior CMS. Stronger permissions, better multi-user structure, cleaner MVC patterns, more enterprise-capable architecture. WordPress started as a blog engine. Joomla should have dominated.
But over time WordPress won on experience. Its simplicity, lower onboarding friction, broad hosting support, and ecosystem momentum pulled non-technical users in at scale. Joomla's developer community, while talented, had internal fractures. Major version releases repeatedly broke themes and plugins. Users left not because Joomla failed technically but because the experience of staying became too costly.
We watched users leave the ecosystem gradually over several years. By 2018, Shape5 was still profitable but the long-term trend was clear. Because the decline happened gradually, we had time to act strategically rather than react emotionally.
We initiated conversations with JoomlArt and ultimately sold the company. To this day, JoomlArt still hosts and sells Shape5 products.
WordPress's simplicity let non-technical users get started without help. Joomla required a steeper learning curve even for basics.
Hosting companies promoted WordPress heavily as the simpler choice, driving massive user acquisition at the platform level.
Joomla major releases repeatedly broke existing installs. The cost of staying current made users consider switching ecosystems entirely.
WordPress's massive plugin ecosystem created a self-reinforcing growth loop. Joomla's community fragmentation worked in reverse.
We initiated conversations with JoomlArt and ultimately sold the company.
To this day, JoomlArt still hosts and sells Shape5 products.
The acquisition made sense for both sides. JoomlArt gained a mature product catalog, a large customer base, and significant SEO equity. Shape5 products remain available and actively sold on the JoomlArt platform today.
Visit JoomlArtUser Feedback
"I am an artist/web designer/photographer and would normally prefer to do my own templates but I ran into a situation in which I needed to get my website rebuilt ASAP while working on another and just didn't have the time to create my own template from scratch. So I was searching for templates that would meet my design standards in which professional looks and clean layout were of most importance. I stumbled across your October template for photography and absolutely love the simple design and the Vmart implementation was a nice bonus. I was looking for just free templates I could quickly modify to suit my taste but... that template just really caught me eye and I must say that this was first time I spent money to get any pre-made templates by joining here for membership. I am currently working on the October template and site hoping to have it ready by end of the month. This has really save me a lot of time while in a pinch and feel it was worth the money spent in my situation where time was the critical factor. Thanks for the great designs!"
"I came across shape5.com while looking for an easy template and even easier extensions as I was then an absolute novice user of joomla. I fell in love with their extremely well designed and attractive templates. The best I had seen after searching online for quite a while. I was however a bit scared of the installation and use, since I was very new to joomla. I shouldn't have been. The installation was extremely easy, and configuration even easier. It was so easy I really felt like a professional designer within a couple of hours. The service from shape5 is just unbeatable. All my questions where answered right on time, and of course all were very silly questions. I realise this now after a couple of days. I truly applaud their kindness and patience with idiotic questions. Shape5 is the way to go guys, I am glad I found them!"
"Have to love it when a site just works the way it's supposed to. The sign up process was quick, easy, painless. Within minutes I was downloading my template(s) and loading them on my site. It makes a difference. Awesome templates. Great documentation, easy to install and use. I only have one minor issue. There are so many options, so many features, so many choices, I'm spending more time playing with them than I am getting any work done. But I guess that's actually a good thing."
"Just wanted to say thanks for the great templates! I bought a developer membership last week because I have a client who was in a bit of a rush to get a site up. I'm a programmer whose graphic design skills...have room for improvement, shall we say.. so these templates are really making that aspect of things a whole lot easier. The questions I've had so far have all had to do with where to find the settings for this and that, and I have found all the answers to my questions in the forum and have not had to contact support for anything yet. A lot of those questions have also had a lot to do with my own being a bit new to Joomla. I've already finished one site with the Sea of Glass template, and I like the experience very much. I have decided to use these templates for another 4 clients. So far I am very happy with the templates - they're making me look like I have my own creative design department! Thanks a bunch!"
"I try to use free stuff whenever possible and some extensions I have paid for would have been over priced if even they were free. As a result I was very reticent when it came to paying for Shape 5 membership. As it turns out, I cannot find a single thing to complain about. The templates I have tried all work beautifully (except when I get an attack of stupid - see next paragraph) and same with extentions. I have now created 3 commercial sites and every customer is over the moon with the results."
"Talking about theme, support is the most important thing. It is a great feeling knowing that I will get a quick response to my questions. Joomla has developed this particular situation; code programmer working to deliver application to us, the website developers. To get it to work the code developer must understand the specific relationship between me (the questioner) and the code developer (the support). I have been like many of you jumping from one place to another trying to find the balance I need, and you know what? I found the answer to my questions here. If you are a website developer and you are like me, and you are always in a hurry and wait until the last moment....this could be the answer to your questions. The theme's here are pretty, the theme's are solid like a mature product and the support here is really fast."
"I have been in many clubs template, and no one give awesome templates + great and fast support as Shape 5 does. I will not renew my others clubs template, but be sure I will renew to Shape 5. Thank you so much Mikek and Jonahh, for all your great work and support,I wish you to be the most important Joomla club template."
"Shape 5 Has it all together. Great templates: The do not leave out any details. Each template is professionally created and tested. Very Organized: The website is very well organized and dependable. Everything is done by a system and the system works. Cutting Edge: The work Shape 5 does in template and module creation is Cutting Edge...You may only get one chance to present your business, product or self to the world, I would venture to say if you go with Shape 5, you will present well. Note Joomla Website Develops... If you take the time to learn how Shape 5 does things, you can take their templates and create just about anything. Then, each month, you can expect an NEW awesome creation."
"I looked at other Joomla clubs, but no one is offering what Shape5 has when it comes to original designs, modern fresh interfacing and many different options to complete the perfect package. Some are close, I already own developer membership with other clubs, but Shape5 is the most consistent and stood out above all others. They are well worth every penny and I'm looking forward to future months of their design and services."
"Ok I just got here with a membership and I allready feel fine :-) I dont know why this happens yet but taking into account that I am writing this means something. Apart from that What i have to say is that Shape 5 templates are the best I have found around and what I like the most apart from the great quality is the difference that each template has. So thanks. You guys and girls are doing a GREAT job!"
"I wanted to thank you for providing great service and quality responses to customer concerns on your site. You really know how to run a business. I recently purchased an extension from another company to try it out. Many users have all had problems with it and the usual response on their forums is "have you read the instructions?" or "send in a trouble ticket and we'll fix it for you." Neither of those responses are particularly useful. One is condescending and the other doesn't fix the bugs in the module or educate the user about how the module actually works. This experience made me realise how much of a risk people take when they purchase a "virtual" product with no refunds and how disappointing it can be when it doesn't work out. I'm happy to see again and again that you provide consistent advice and really look into the concerns and problems people post here. You patch up actual bugs and you consistently help people through those problems that are caused by confusion or inexperience. It has led to you create a really solid product. A product I will be happy to pass along to others once I upgrade my membership. For our own company, I have been working with the Duoplate and New Architect Templates and I had a friend purchase a membership so I could put together a Sea of Glass template for him and they are all shaping up nicely and looking really good. Thank you."
"Thank you for providing good quality templates and great support services. Your tech team went above and beyond to provide timing support which is so valuable in this industry. I can’t thank you guys enough. I’ll keep referring you to any Joomla users."
"I wanted to write to thank you for your excellent templates. I lack the creativity and ability to create such wonderful templates, and have come to LOVE the ones that you have created. The template-club price is reasonable and the forum is very helpful. Thank you so much for being a resource for me. I can configure websites for my clients that they LOVE!"
Outcome
11 years of consistent product execution. Bootstrapped from zero with no outside funding. Built and scaled one of the top five Joomla template companies globally.
Reflection
Shape5 taught me that successful products are rarely just about features or aesthetics. Momentum matters. Low friction matters. Ecosystem health matters. Support, onboarding, documentation, upgrade stability, infrastructure resilience, and long-term maintainability shape the user experience just as much as interface design itself.
Watching WordPress surpass Joomla despite Joomla's stronger technical foundation reinforced one of the most important lessons of my career: the products that win are often the products that are easiest to adopt, easiest to maintain, and easiest to build momentum around. Shape5 gave me experience across the full lifecycle of digital products, from design and engineering to growth, scaling, support, monetization, and acquisition. It remains one of the most formative product experiences of my career.
