Approaching its 7th birthday, today Jupiter now has more than 40,000 users, being recognized as one of the top-selling themes in the Envato Marketplaces and one of the top five WordPress themes in the world.

2015 was a testament to the evolution and advancement of Artbees, seeing a surge in sales as Artbees continued to advance its most prominent theme, Jupiter, and grow its team and vision to extend its scope of services.

Now with an impressive 90+ templates spread out across two themes, 130+ shortcodes, 24/7 premium support, a thriving blog, and Artbees Care experts standing by to help you with any part of your website building projects, it’s hard to believe that just a few years ago Artbees was just the humble musing of a few guys. At this point, having perhaps gotten caught up in the accelerating momentum of growing a now thriving business, when we are deciding how to move forward, we at Artbees try to take a moment of pause to look back on where we came from.

From web design frustrations to solutions

It was in the Fall of 2009 that Max, Rouz and Bob first began to consider what their ideal website-building tool might look like. At the time Rouz was working as a full-time graphic designer, Max as an icon designer and Bob as a developer. By then they’d each had their fair share of experiences with the ins and outs of web design agencies enough to see the, in what their opinion was an unnecessary barrier that seemed to be built between developers and web designers and their clients. Over time, they had grown increasingly frustrated with the hyped up prices and inaccessibility small businesses and startups seemed to face when hiring agencies to build a high-quality, functional website. Looking back on that time, Max explained,

“actually Artbees didn’t start with an idea about a particular product or service. It was more of an idea or an ideal state where design and function should meet. That’s why it’s been free and flexible during its evolution and even now we still expect even more growth, creativity and innovation in the way ahead.”

One foot in the door

The first step they took in getting their feet wet was by beginning to provide high-quality assets in GraphicRiver and premium freebies in DeviantArt. Rouz remarked,

“of course those were tiny and very simple projects but it was driven by our passion to create effective solutions for digital publishing challenges. That’s when we figured out that our ultimate goal was to develop a solution for one of the biggest challenges of the web. Website creation.”

Within months the Artbees brand and concept began to gain momentum and recognition in design blogs, such as Smashing Magazine and other web design forums alike. Just one year after they started their venture, Artbees was named as the Top-Selling Author of the month by GraphicRiver and after claiming independence from DeviantArt, Artbees.net launched becoming the new home where design and function could finally come together.

The three partners were even more taken aback when granted the Elite Author Badge by Envato, deciding that maybe it was indeed time to take a chance and submit their first WordPress Theme to Themeforest. Now looking back they admit it was a bit nerve-wracking.

“When you decide to put your work out on the international stage, of course it’s always scary and stressful. Especially since we had been working on this theme for such a long time—putting everything into it. We were intimidated by every single theme submitted to the marketplace every day.”

Not so fast.

Now if you’re familiar with every great success, you know what usually needs to happen first. Failure. Well, after submitting their first WordPress Theme Dimension 4 to Themeforest and being rejected twice, Rouz, Max and Bob had to pull their bootstraps up and harness some leftover resilience to start over. “Oh the first time we were rejected by the marketplace was the worst of all. Mostly because we were so confident that what we had built was brilliant. We felt humiliated and devastated when we saw it happened. I know it may sound like a cliche but actually this failure worked like magic. It was like medicine for us. Bitter yet useful.”

The three went back to the drawing board and created a completely brand new Theme, LucidPress. Despite having had their last two submissions rejected, Rouz and Bob considered the possibility that perhaps they needed to go in a different direction, but soon decided they were still adamant as ever in maintaining the underlying holy principle of their work—design and function coming together in an easy-to-learn environment. Within months LucidPress ended up as one of the top-selling themes in Themeforest. This was a pinnacle milestone for the Artbees team and catapulted them into developing their next big WordPress theme.

Elevated Versatility. Growing Customizability.

Artbees began to quicken its pace in nourishing its mission to couple design and function by introducing Jupiter which sought to be a theme that could be used by any sector or niche and would offer an unprecedented level of customizability using a Drag-and-Drop builder.

“Basically we saw the WordPress Theme as an outfit, decked out with the latest accessories and trends. Just as you can with clothes, you can change the features and appearance of your website as different trends evolved; something for all seasons so to speak. A theme that doesn’t get old or boring obviously needed to be something that could change just like your tastes and desires. A style that could be customized by user preferences.”

Today, Jupiter has evolved over several upgrades into the Jupiter V5 which has become the go-to WordPress theme for over 40,000 users across the globe and across all industries. Within this theme the vision of creating a website-building tool that could be easily learned, intuitive and still produce a beautiful and high-performing website has been realized and the Artbees team has been relentless in continually improving it to that end. With 80 ready-made templates that cover a wide variety of industries and sectors, anyone can use the 130+ shortcodes available to make even a pre-set template unique and reflective of their enterprise.

One year after the first version of Jupiter was released, Artbees launched The Ken, a theme that could be specifically used for creative professionals, startups and digital agencies.

“The Ken was a more straightforward answer for creatives, startups and those who needed to make a beeline to getting a creative website up and running. Having experienced working in the creative industry ourselves we tried to directly address the issues creative professionals were facing when trying to create websites.”

Again, the creators of The Ken wanted to bring the website designing and building process to a level that could be understood and used by individuals across all technological skillsets. Included in The Ken are 11 ready-made templates that are also powered by Visual Composer and are compatible with WooCommerce and other most popularly used plugins.

Staying on the right track with a little help from our users.

After gaining momentum and becoming more widely used, every company experiences that moment as they wait anxiously to come face to face with the onslaught of customer reviews and feedback. Dozens of stories came in and interviews with users across several sectors and states were conducted to determine if Artbees was on the right track to providing a low-cost, intuitive, sleek and highly functioning WordPress theme.

“What we quickly found though was that any negative feedback we received, sometimes even snarky or biting, was actually much appreciated as it often pinpointed blind spots we had and allowed us to quickly remedy those gaps in service or function.”

Other users, though, had a different story…

Having created over 35 websites for mid-size to small businesses using Jupiter, Colorado-based BlizzardPress co-founders, Kristen and Trent Blizzard shared insights into just exactly how they were able to run a more lucrative web design and digital marketing business and provide more cost-effective services for their clients using only one WordPress theme.

“Simply put, Jupiter makes our life more profitable. We are able to deliver modern sites with varied designs and high functionality for a reasonable cost to the client.”

Over in Michigan, we caught up with Curtis Hays who, with over 15 years in digital marketing explained to us,

“when I’m telling other developers who are out there and asking me what themes to use for their clients, I always go to Jupiter first because it’s always being updated, I know you guys haven’t abandoned that theme and it’s a theme that people can stick with for a long time and that’s really what you want.”

On the East Coast, Adam Binder, founder of Creative Click Media, showed us countless examples of clients he and his team had worked with using their expertise paired with Jupiter to skyrocket each website’s SEO. Even for their very own company website, they decided to redesign it using Jupiter. “Since we launched the latest version of our website using the Jupiter we’ve been able to increase our conversions—they’re now at 4% whereas before we were under 1%!”

Many more users including Tom Weinkle, founder of Miami-based web design agency and Jose Rosado, part-time web design freelancer in the Dominican Republic, over time found that for many of their incoming projects it just seemed to make more and more sense to use Jupiter as it seemed to always fulfill client needs. Micah Blumenthal who works predominantly with non profit organizations, felt that Jupiter’s low cost and long-term dependability was finally the answer to providing nonprofits with a platform to guarantee high turnout and fundraising opportunities.

Far from being finished.

Now, from 3 dreamers in 2009 to 20 in 2016, the Artbees family still considers itself to be nowhere close to where it aims to be and yet the initial goals that fueled Rouz, Max and Bob’s first musings still lie at the core of every initiative and extension of their services and products. With the release of a major upgrade to Jupiter at the beginning of 2016, the better than ever Jupiter V5 has been praised by web design & marketing agencies, creative professionals and artists across the United States and beyond as their ‘go-to’ theme. Major web design journals including SpeckyBoy, WebDesignLedger, DavidWalsh, and Instantshift have acknowledged Artbees Themes as the world’s fastest and lightest WordPress theme as well as the last theme you’ll ever have to buy.

Many would deem this a success story and certainly our team here at Artbees does from time to time take a moment of pause to appreciate how far we’ve come, the progress that’s been made and visions that have been realized. Though you can bet that the same insatiable drive that pushed Rouz, Max and Bob to start this venture has now infected the rest of us giving us no choice but to continue actively seeking out every opportunity to improve your Artbees experience.

“We have been working in the WordPress theme sector for some years now and we’ve learned many lessons—some of them came at a bigger cost. Though we feel what we have always wanted, an ultimate experience of website authoring and publishing without the nuts and bolts of programming, is not yet achieved. Making a digital product requires us to be the interpreter translating a technical language into a universal human one. The key to success though, is how you translate it.”

[– This post is sponsored via Syndicate. –]