Overview

Church123 (C123) is a church website CMS product developed by a small established company based in London. Serving customers across the globe, they are highly recommended by many leading Christian organisations such as The Church of England, The Baptist Union, The Methodist Church of Great Britain and the Evangelical Alliance.

C123 is has been designed very much with the non-technical or novice user in mind and with lots of 'safety nets' to prevent users making mistakes. The 'back-office' system is accessed by your Internet Explorer browser and has a simple wizard to get you up and running. You can choose from the large range of 'off the shelf' design templates (which vary in quality from the very good to very mundane) or you can employ a designer to produce a bespoke template (such as the examples below). The main site editing functions will be familiar to anyone who has used a word-processor such as MS Word and it is simple to edit text and add photos. More advanced page layout options can be achieved using the built-in table builder. There are useful options for embedding content from 3rd party websites such as a YouTube movie, An Amazon Product, a scripture from BibleGateway or an RSS feed from another site. (C123 does not produce it's own RSS feeds) There is also a good form builder to create a contact form and email addresses are encoded to help prevent spam. There is full support for up to 2 levels of navigation, (although you can manually create further levels but they won't appear in the main menus) and a built in link-checker which will check for dead links. The system will also prevent you uploading images that are too large for web use (a common mistake by novices) and will re-size them for you.

There is well-implemented support for editing permissions - ie. you can have multiple site editors but restrict individuals to certain pages they can edit. You can also create password protected pages for a 'members-only' area.

It is possible to add podcasting support (most commonly used for sermon downloads) to a C123 site. This requires you to register with a third party service (such as Switchpod) and is not built into the system, however once configured, it will fit pretty seamlessly into the site.

From a technical standpoint, the code generated by church123 is good. The vast majority of C123 templates are crafted in CSS. This is beneficial as it makes sites quick to load and particularly user friendly for those with disabilities. With over 130 templates to pick from and custom designs available there is plenty of choice. Their menu system produces easy to navigate accessible menus avoiding hidden scripting, fly-outs or Flash (all of which can cause accessibility issues).

C123 websites produce tidy URLs based on the page names you choose, so a typical URL will look like this "http://www.churchname.org/alpha" This is good from a usability standpoint and helps search engines indexing pages.

For more information about C123 see their website where you can try the system for free. Alternatively call their friendly help desk on 020 8949 6005.

User Experience

The interface is clear, pleasant, generally well-designed and mostly self-explanatory with useful hits & tips that appear alongside some of the editing tools. However some of the interface features are annoying and can really slow you down when initially constructing your site. (For example the user is forced to do regular 'site re-builds' and page 'reloads' ). Pages you are editing appear in pop-up windows and it does feel like there are some unnecessary extra steps to achieve simple tasks. What the system really needs is an 'advanced mode' which would allow confident users to by pass the extra steps put in place to help the novice.

Support

Undoubtedly C123 offer the best support of all the CMS providers. They offer free telephone support to all their customers and you can call them any time and speak to a friendly human straight away who will answer your queries. The simplicity of the C123 system should also mean you probably will not need to ask for help very often as most aspects of the system are easy to master. There is no documentation on their website but they do provide a real goldmine of general advice about church website design.

Pricing

Pricing is very straightforward - £195 per year + VAT for the UK (international pricing is available on their site) and that includes everything - the CMS hosting, email and support. Without doubt this represents great value for money and demonstrates C123 are focused on serving churches ahead of making money.

Example sites:

I have provided bespoke template designs for these clients: (and the churches have subsequently added and amended pages themselves)

Revelation Church (London)
Queens Road Church (Wimbledon)
Andover Vineyard
Sutton Christian Centre
The Well Church (Blyth Valley)

Conclusions

Pros: Simplicity, designed with the non-technical user in mind. Exceptionally good value for money. Provided by a small friendly company who are adding new features (albeit slowly). There are only a few restrictions on template design so a C123 site can look great if you have a good designer. Excellent free telephone support makes customers feel valued and supported.

Cons: Some features are restrictive for experienced users. Some of the extra functionality such as calendars and blogs utilise third party solutions. This may mean logging in to a second system on occasions (however, it does give you the pick of the crop such as the Google Calendar). There is only proper support for 2 levels of navigation so if you are planning a large website, C123 will struggle. (You can manually add links for further levels). Users have to run Internet Explorer web browser for Windows to edit sites (Apple Mac users will either be forced to use a PC or run Windows emulation software). That said, sites generated with the system can be viewed in any browser.

It's probably not for you if: - You are a large church and need a website with more than 50 pages, want advanced interactive functionality such as e-commerce or member management features, have technically proficient 'power users' who could become frustrated with the restrictions in the system that are designed to help novices, are die-hard Mac users.

It's probably for you if: - You are a small-medium sized church, have a limited budget, need something really easy to use and want to get up and running quickly with a minimal investment in training, want free helpful telephone support.