As promised, I am going to provide an independent review of the 3 leading UK Church website Content Management Systems (CMS). They are Church Insight, Church123 and Church Advance. There are a few other minor UK church CMS players, but I have close working relationship with all 3 of these providers so I can write from experience and offer a balanced first-hand view.

Overview

Church Insight (CI) is a product of a well established company called Endis who are based in Cambridge, UK. With a team of developers and an international customer base, it is by far the largest of the church CMS providers. This is a big advantage as it means Endis have a substantial team and the CI product is actively being developed and upgraded monthly to meet the requests of its customers and all users benefit from these upgrades. It is vital to understand that Church Insight differs significantly from the other offerings in that it is not just a CMS, but a whole church member management system. Each member can have their own log-in and administer their own details and preferences. This allows the church office to send mail-outs to members, saving admin and postage costs. Most importantly the site can be made to show different content for logged-in members than for general visitors. This is important as church websites need to appeal to both potential visitors as well as church members. CI offers a vast amount of additional functionality specifically tailored for churches.

In addition to the basic website CMS, some of the highlight features of CI are; member management- the Church has the ability to send mass emailings to everyone or different groups within the church. There are events calendars integrated into the website - ie. you can set the pages to display a calendar of forthcoming events which update automatically. There is excellent support for uploading and management of podcasts and video. There is support for rotas, email reminders and a booking system for resources such as PA equipment or room hire. It is possible to set up online event registration - people can book and pay for forthcoming events online. There is support for e-commerce - ie. the church can have it's own online shop at take a percentage of revenue from sales.

CI has lots of support for interactivity which can provide channels for feedback and discussion is likely to become more and more important to a generation increasingly used to being part of Facebook and other online social networking sites. There is extensive support for forums, for example general discussion about the Christian life or a place to put all those small ads and save printing that sheet, or simply for blog-like comments on articles - whether church-wide stuff on discussion documents among elders, children's workers or musicians. Consequently, the church can increasingly become a community that's interacting online - not just at meetings. this can really help with a sense of involvement & belonging. This can also really help church members in remote mission situations - they still feel connected to home base.

The CI back-office allows many people to access the system simultaneously and levels of permissions can be set. For example the church secretary might be sending an email out to small group leaders while the children's ministry leader is updating rotas and syllabus information that are viewable only by the logged-in members of the children's worker's team.

CI is unique from the graphic designer's pointer of view. Instead of designing and coding, then supplying the template to them to integrate into the site, the template design is actually constructed in the system via the browser, using the 'Theme Park' area. This has the advantage that changes to the design can be made at anytime without involving help from CI staff. However, the while the Theme Park is fantastically clever, it is hard to use and requires the designer to spend considerable time learning to use it. There are also some limitations (although not a big issue) on what the designer can do, for example there must be a horizontal navigation bar with drop-down menus, and must include standard CI header and footer components. General updates to page content (as opposed to template design) using the layout editor are reasonably easy to achieve using a series of 'components' such as articles, images, calendars etc that you add to your page.

It is not possible to cover the full spectrum of CI features here. There is more information on the (rather lacklustre) CI website and if you contact me I can put you in touch with people who can give you further info.

User Experience

While CI is hugely powerful, the downside is that it is fairly complex to master. Although it is administered using just your Firefox web browser, the interface it not especially user-friendly and is frankly poor in places by modern standards. (eg. multiple pop-up windows, slow re-draws and unnecessary steps to achieve simple tasks) CI has been around for 7 years and it's interface is relatively old technology which makes for a slow and clunky experience. However although slow at times, it does actually work as advertised and it is possible to become proficient with it in time. To learn to use CI properly, church staff will need to attend training courses run by Endis. Although it may seem daunting at first, the investment in staff training will pay off as the power of the system saves time and money in the longer term, particularly as membership grows.

For the technically minded, the CI system produces web pages that are table-based. This is old technology and has been superseded by CSS. Although users see little difference in their browser, CSS-based pages are quicker to load and most importantly, are more disability standards-compliant. (ie work better for blind people using audio screen readers). This is a significant technical issue which CI needs to address. CI does however provide "low graphics" versions of the pages which is a rather crude 'stop-gap' solution to this problem.

Unfortunately CI websites produce untidy page URLs, eg a typical page URL will look like this: "http://www.churchname.org/Group/Group.aspx?id=28574". This is not great from a usability standpoint and is not ideal for search engines indexing pages. However CI will resolve simple URLs so you could type in "www.churchname.org/alpha" and it would go to the Alpha page.

Support

CI provide paid-for training courses as the first stop for those learning to use the system. (Usually 2 days at £200 per delegate) In addition to training courses, there is some documentation on their website, although for such a complex system it is rather inadequate but this is slowly being improved with video tutorials etc. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed which provides news of their monthly updates, dates of courses etc. They also provide slightly reluctant telephone support. They will answer your questions but prefer people to do their training courses.

Pricing

Until recently, CI was charging a hefty 75p per church member, per month (eg. a church with 500 members would pay £4,500 per year) for the complete system but has recently re-structured pricing to a more friendly 3-level system. There is not space here to detail exactly what each level offers but essentially; Level 1 (£65 per month) offers the CMS and member management and mailing tools, Level 2 (£130 per month) adds audio & video support, the ability to edit site templates and e-commerce features. Level 3 (£260 per month) is the complete feature set and includes, online resource booking, member tracking, a dedicated shop and advanced database management. It is possible to 'buy down' additional specific features if you don't have the full Level 3 package .

Example sites:

These are some of the best CI sites (from a design point of view). Remember you will see the content for the general public but logged-in members maybe seeing something quite different.
Church of Christ the King (Brighton),
City Hope Church (London),
City Church (Cambridge),
Woodside Church, (Bedford)
Fusion UK (students),
Alpha USA (Chicago)

Conclusions

Pros: Powerful and has huge potential to revolutionise communication within churches. 'Future-proof' and makes more sense, the larger your church becomes. Great support for interactive and online networking features which are increasingly important. Could save huge amounts of money in admin costs - postage, printing etc in the long-term. Support for online-booking of events etc and e-commerce built into the product. Always being developed by an established company with new features rolled out free each month. There is nothing else quite like CI available anywhere else.

Cons: Relatively expensive, especially if you just want a website CMS. Steep learning curve requires big investment of time and money by the church in it's staff to make the most of it. Old table-based webpages and clunky user interface. Documentation and support could be improved. Poor range of 'off-the shelf' templates - you will probably need to pay a designer to create bespoke templates.

It's probably not for you if: - You are a small church, only want website CMS features, have a very limited budget, don't have the time, staff or resources needed to really make full use of the features. Smaller churches may want to consider the Level 1 option if they want something that can grow with them, but if you just want a basic CMS then there are other mores suitable alternatives.

It's probably for you if: - You are a large church (400+ members), want to invest in a 'future-proof' system that will cope with significant growth, want member management features and e-commerce functions, Want member log-in and 'web 2' type community and interactive features.