ChurchThemes was started by Frankie Jarrett in 2011. Frankie is now the Head of WordPress Product at X-Team, makers of Stream — a product I reviewed a few months ago. Frankie also talked about Stream and ChurchThemes on the Matt Report recently.
Today, Lift is announcing the acquisition of ChurchThemes. Lift is a consultancy and also owner of UpThemes, a theme shop I’ve covered before. Lift co-founder Chris Wallace said the following for a press release that’s do out tomorrow:
We met Frankie at WordCamp Austin just as we were preparing to release our first church theme, Uplifted. Once we found out Frankie was looking for a buyer for ChurchThemes, we immediately saw an opportunity to make a fantastic addition to our WordPress product lineup.
Along with the acquisition of ChurchThemes, Lift has also hired two new people to join their team.
Adam Clark is joining as the Director of Product. Adam is the founder of wptheory, a service for doing WordPress websites in one day. He’s also a co-founder of Good Stuff FM podcast network, where he hosts The Gently Mad (a favorite of mine) and other shows.
Adam will be leading the day-to-day of ChurchThemes for Lift, which they hope to expand to be a hosted service for church websites, and not just self-hosted theme downloads. They want ChurchThemes to be a hub for themes, but also a marketplace for photography and other assets useful for church website builders.
Adam states in the press release that he’s wanted to do a hosted church website solution for a while, having planted churches and built websites in that ecosystem, but didn’t have the resources to do it.
When I met Chris and Brad [founders of Lift], it quickly became apparent that our visions for such a product were remarkably similar. In the end, we decided the best way to build something truly great was to join forces.
Adam talks more about the move on his personal blog.
Lift is also finalizing an agreement to bring on a dedicated sales and business strategy person who is fairly well known in the WordPress world.
Update: they’ve now announced the new hire as James Dalman. Read Lift’s announcement, or check it out on James’ personal blog.
Hitting a big niche market
The church market is a big one, for sure. It’s been a successful niche for a handful of theme developers and I’m sure hundreds of small agencies and freelancers. Steven Gliebe’s ChurchThemes.com comes to mind as one that’s done well on Theme Forest (Roughly $250k in lifetime revenue), and now on his own site. Unfortunately these two shops are only different in name by the .com/.net TLD extensions.
Happy Tables and Restaurant Engine are my classic examples of hosted WordPress solutions for a huge niche, and I think the church website market is big enough to have a handful of players as well. Most churches want the same kind of stuff: podcasts, events, photo galleries.
In these types of hosted markets, the technology and the solutions themselves are second to the marketing and the consistent investment into building the business that’s required. Some of Brian Casel’s podcasts about running Restaurant Engine are really good to listen to if you’re interested in the hosted market.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Lift will do in this space. They’ve got a big enough and good enough team, and I think they will be able to sustain the passion and marketing levels that are required to make something like this a success.
Buying a successful theme business will be easier than marketing their own, and I think acquiring ChurchThemes gives them a nice head start into the church theme and website world.
I just launched a site for a pretty big church and it’s been one of the most challenging but rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on. It’s running a custom theme and was about a 9 month project.
There were definitely times where things got overwhelming and I felt that the job should have been taken on by an agency, as opposed to me, by myself. The large amount of stake holders and varying needs that evolved throughout the project became dizzying.
Despite that, it’s been great, the work is still ongoing, and I foresee a relationship that will likely last for years.
Anyone working in the Church space will have likely heard of (or will be hearing about) CCB, the Community Church Builder church database system. If you’re needing to integrate CCB into your WordPress site, I strongly suggest you check out CCB Press.
One of my big challenges was finding a way to integrate CCB data natively into my build. CCB has an API but that type of integration is outside of my skill set. Until recently there have been (to my knowledge) no out of the box solutions for working with WP and CCB. I was vetting candidates to hire for a custom solution when CCB Press launched and kind of saved the day for me.
Brian, you should have a look at the good work Daniel Milner and the folks at Firetree Design are doing with CCB Press.
Link – http://ccbpress.com
Thanks for the shout-out Jimmy!
Daniel,
Maybe you could share some insight as well into how much time it takes on average to integrate and link up to CCB? As well as maybe some pointers for styling it to match my church’s website?
Thanks!
Hey Jimmy!
I am just starting a project for my own church actually and I am looking to build a website on WordPress and use the CCB Press plugin. I did have a question for you though. How much time did it take would you say to do just that part? The CCB Press integration. And do you have any tips for someone starting out? We are starting CCB and launching a new WP site at the same time.
Also, could you share a link to the site that you worked on so I can see what it looked like please?
Thanks! 🙂
Regards,
Hunter
Hey Hunter –
No problem. The site that I built is here – http://www.centralpc.org/
The event list in the footer is pulling from CCB, as is the events page, and the Get Connected page. There’s a few more pages that use CCB as well.
The theme is a custom design using Eddie Machado’s Bones starter theme as the base. It uses a lot of custom post types and advanced custom fields stuff. Every stakeholder had their own particular needs and a lot of time was spent making sure that these needs were served.
To be honest, it’s *still* an ongoing work in progress. 🙂
With regards to the CCBPress plugin, it was super easy to get up and running. You’ll need to create an API user in CCB and assign it the proper permissions. From there it’s as simple as inputting the CCB API key and choosing which pages you’d like your information to output to.
Styling is easy as well, provided you have some knowledge of CSS.
Also, I’m sure Daniel will fill you in with more details on the plugin, but I want to add that he has been excellent with support.
Hope that helps some – I’m just getting started with my work day here, but I wanted to take a quick minute to get back to you before I shut down my email. If you have any further questions please feel free to drop me a line at jimmy at smutek dot net.
🙂