A Review of ChurchAddress

I consider the offerings of ChurchAddress.com to be a superior product. It is easy to use and offers many features.

Here are my thoughts… be sure to read to the bottom because there is one large disadvantage of using this church web site hosting company.

• Though they don't offer live support (see below), there are help cues everywhere. A question mark appears along with every item. Hover your mouse over the question mark and a small pop-up appears that gives a brief explanation of that item.
• The interface that you work with is very user-friendly. It is logical. If you want to create a new page – click on New Page. When you want to update a prayer request – you guessed it, click on the prayer request. All of the primary functions are like that. You won’t need to hunt for the next step.
• The online store uses PayPal. That is good because PayPal is the easiest way to offer anything for sale. It might be a tangible product or it might be tickets to your next event. Either way, it’s easy to do with PayPal. It's also the best way to take online donations/offerings.
• Two rather unique options are the hospital list and the outreach list. You can detail why a person is in the hospital and when they were last visited. With the outreach/visitation list you can describe people who need to be contacted.
• ChurchAddress hosts about 2,700 sites. Though not as many as some of its competitors it is still a substantial number. They are a tested church web site hosting company.
• The form builder is very simple to use. You can create forms for anything. Use it for a ministry sign-up, for instance. Have people give their name, email address, phone number, and then select from a dropdown list (that you create) the type of ministry they are signing up for.
• You can pay ChurchAddress $500+ to develop your site’s banner, look and feel or you can do it yourself. Most of the time, I recommend that you spend the money to have the designers do it for you. However, with ChurchAddress, they give you great flexibility in creating your banner/header. You can choose from hundreds of pictures and color backgrounds. It's easy to make your site look unique.
• You can insert RSS feeds into your content anywhere you want. Doing it the first time is a little tricky. But once you do it once, it will be no problem after that. RSS feeds are a great way to keep your site up-to-date. You can add news feeds or blog updates, for instance. This is a great way to keep people coming back again and again.
• All of the standard options are provided in the advanced church product. There's weather, calendar, audio/video, photo galleries, a directory, and multiple email accounts.
• A negative is that ChurchAddress does not submit your pages to the search engines. You will have to do this manually and basically hope that the search engines will stumble upon your site.
• I had a minor problem when I was trying to work on my banner/header. I got the site title up fine. But for some reason, the logo sentence wouldn't go where I wanted it to go. That would have been a great time for some live support.
• As I pointed out above, ChurchAddress.com offers a superior product. But… there is a problem. The support they offer only comes in two varieties: online help articles and email support. Many times, your question can be answered by the online help articles. However, there will be many times when you don’t understand something and the help articles don’t give you the information you need. In those cases you will not be able to call or do a live chat with a real person. You have to email your question. They say that they typically respond within two hours. And when I submitted a question I was answered within 45 minutes. But what if you need an answer right away? What if you are leaving the office in 30 minutes and need to finish your email newsletter now? You can't wait for an email back – you need to know now.

  This doesn't mean, of course, that other church web site hosting companies will answer the phone immediately. But at least in most circumstances, you can usually talk to a real person during normal business hours. In my opinion, this lack of live help is a real drawback for ChurchAddress.

Conclusion

ChurchAddress offers a superior product. But you may get frustrated by the lack of live support.

You can review their offerings on their web site: ChurchAddress.com. Or, you can go back and look at some of our other reviews.

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