Steven Gliebe recently launched a brand new theme business built around a niche audience. It’s called Churchthemes.com So far, there is only one theme available for purchase on the site, but that will soon change, as outlined by Steve in a detailed post that explains the reasoning for starting the business. It’s a great story of how an experiment that started on ThemeForest with a theme called Risen led to Steve leaving Themeforest and starting up his own business, providing him complete control.
A few weeks ago, we linked to the results of Justin Tadlock’s one year ThemeForest experiment. One of Justin’s follow-up experiments was to separate functionality in themes to plugins:
These plugins handle functionality that I often see in themes at ThemeForest. The idea is to get theme authors to adopt a standard (whether it’s my plugins or someone else’s). Think of the standards that BuddyPress, bbPress, WooCommerce, and others have set. That’s the type of thing I’m interested in.
At least one person was paying attention. Learning from his mistakes with Risen, Steve built a content plugin that contains post types, taxonomies, and custom fields. This enables users to switch between any theme that supports his content plugin without the content disappearing.
I love how Steve has outlined the process from idea, to launching the business. He’s at the beginning stages and based on what I’ve read, he’s put himself in a good position both from a pricing stand point and he’s provided a method of recurring revenue. It helps that Resurrect is a great looking theme. I can see people using it for more than just churches. Please stop by Churchthemes.com and use the comment form here to provide feedback for Steven.
Hey Jeff, thanks for the coverage of churchthemes.com.
I hope many have been inspired by Tadlock, in particular on this issue. It’s probably safe to say he’s right about everything when it comes to WordPress development practices. It’s to everyone’s benefit to do what he suggests. As a community, we owe a lot to his example over the years.
(Small note: We represent ourselves as “churchthemes.com”. There’s another shop at churchthemes.net called “ChurchThemes” and we’re conscious not to confuse)