WordPress developers Dan Hefferan and Brian Workman have launched a brand new website aimed at helping youth ministries create and host websites called ymLaunch. In a blog post published by Dan Hefferan on his personal site, he tells the how and why ymLaunch was created.
Brian would often go to youth conferences and conferences for youth directors. He would browse through the vendor tables and always wish that there were people who were providing websites for youth directors but also that these websites would be separate from the main church websites. The vendors he was hoping to find, however, didn’t exist. While youth ministry afforded some more flexibility than a standard job, he didn’t have the time to fully learn how to code his own websites. So his ministry remained website-less.
ymLaunch only has one theme available but Dan tells me there are a couple of themes in development that will be available within the next few weeks. Pricing is straight forward with three different options depicted in the following graphic.
Dan has informed me that the site is powered by WordPress Multisite. When asked if ymLaunch would be open to other customers besides youth ministries and churches, Dan told me: “We’ll be limiting it to church related ministries. We could see some smaller churches interested in it as well as others.”
I’m Hoping To See Collaboration With Churchthemes
I asked Dan if they plan on cooperating with Churchthemes launched earlier this year for the same market segment. He was unaware that Churchthemes existed but told me that it would be great to collaborate with Steven Gliebe in the future. Since Churchthemes is a dedicated theme shop for churches and ymLaunch is a hosted service for youth ministries, I think the two would make great collaborators within the same niche.
Good luck to Dan and Brian on their new service.
I haven’t talked to Dan or Brian yet but it might be possible that they could utilize our themes. It looks like what they’re doing is sort of a niche within a niche. With churchthemes.com we’re providing a solution for a whole church website. From what I understand, ymLaunch will be providing very specialized websites for youth ministries within churches or maybe parachurch organizations too. It’s great that they saw a need are and working at meeting it.