Building Strong Foundations

Church Growth Trust is a registered charitable trust supporting churches across England and Wales through property trusteeship, consultancy and practical guidance.

Working alongside Pete Willis at Boilerhouse Creative, I transformed the approved designs into a completely bespoke WordPress website built on the Salient framework. Every major section was custom developed to create a fast, responsive website that is simple for the Church Growth Trust team to manage.

One of the largest parts of the project was developing a bespoke Property Management System. Rather than relying on an off the shelf plugin, I built a custom solution that allows staff to manage church properties through an intuitive WordPress CMS, complete with dynamic property listings, individual property pages, image galleries, maps, downloadable documents and integrated enquiries.

Alongside this, I designed and developed a completely new Resource Library, making hundreds of guides and publications far easier to browse while improving the overall user experience and search engine visibility.

This project perfectly showcases the Rose of the Shires Advanced Website Package. When organisations need more than a standard website, I design and build bespoke digital platforms that are tailored around the way they work.

Enterprise Website Package

Church Growth Trust – Website

What we did

Custom WordPress Development
Bespoke CMS Development
Property Management System
Resource Library
SEO
Performance Optimisation

Project Story

Church Growth Trust is a registered charitable trust supporting churches across England and Wales through property trusteeship, consultancy and practical guidance. Their work helps ensure church buildings continue to be used for Christian ministry for generations to come.

This has been one of the largest and most rewarding website projects I’ve worked on.

From the very beginning it was clear this wasn’t just another website. Church Growth Trust needed a platform that could clearly explain their services, manage hundreds of resources, showcase available church properties and be simple enough for their team to update themselves.

I had the pleasure of working alongside Pete Willis from Boilerhouse Creative, who created the fantastic visual designs for the project. My job was to bring those designs to life in WordPress and engineer everything behind the scenes.

Using Salient as the foundation, we custom coded virtually every section of the website to match Pete’s designs while creating a completely bespoke content management system for the Church Growth Trust team.

Every page has been built to be fast, responsive and incredibly easy to edit without needing any technical knowledge.

The finished website is something we’re both incredibly proud of.

Bespoke Property Management System

One of the biggest parts of the project was developing a completely bespoke Property Management System specifically for Church Growth Trust.

Rather than trying to make an off the shelf plugin fit their workflow, we built a solution around the way they actually work.

The system includes:

• Dynamic property listings
• Individual property pages
• Custom WordPress CMS editing fields
• Image galleries
• Interactive maps
• Property information panels
• Enquiry forms
• Responsive layouts

Future proof architecture

This allows the team to create and manage church properties in minutes while presenting visitors with a clean, professional experience across desktop, tablet and mobile.

Custom Resource Library

Church Growth Trust has built an extensive collection of guides covering church property, governance, fundraising, compliance and building maintenance.

We designed and developed a completely bespoke resource library that makes these guides much easier to browse and discover.

Featured resources sit alongside supporting downloads, making the whole section feel much more like a modern knowledge hub than a collection of PDFs.

Enterprise Website Package

Projects like this are exactly why I created Rose of the Shires. It’s not always about e-commerce websites. Many businesses, charities and organisations need to communicate complex information in a clear, engaging way, and that requires far more than a simple Wix website. Sometimes it means designing and building bespoke systems that are tailored around the way they work.

Some organisations simply need more than a standard website.

They need bespoke systems, custom functionality and a content management system built around the way they work.

Whether that’s managing church properties, a large resource library or completely bespoke business processes, everything is designed around your organisation rather than asking you to adapt to generic software.

Technology

• WordPress Development
• Advanced Custom Fields
• Custom Post Types
• Custom Taxonomies
• PHP
• JavaScript
• Google Maps
• Performance Optimisation
• SEO

Final Thoughts

Working with Church Growth Trust has been an absolute pleasure.

It’s also been fantastic collaborating with Pete Willis at Boilerhouse Creative. Pete produced a brilliant set of designs and together we’ve transformed those concepts into a modern, scalable website that Church Growth Trust can continue to build on for many years.

This is exactly the type of bespoke project I love working on.