faithHighway
a resource in Site Builders| Tech
faithHighway provides a range of web and media services for Churches and Ministries. They specialize in building custom sites for Churches. They’re also the people behind Sermon Connect.
added on 11/05/2009 | Permalink | Trackback
Just have to warn you that faithhighway adds a robots.txt file to your site without your permission that blocks search engines from scanning your supporting webpages (to keep server traffic down) and this hurts you greatly in search results. I do not recommend faithhighway at all. They also have poor customer service.
Do not send faithhighway any money or credit card numbers until you have insisted upon a contract and read it thoroughly, perhaps with an attorney’s assistance. Any deposits you you send them on a “Good Faith” basis they consider to be completely non-refundable, even though they do not disclose that up front. Also, they own your website, and if you decide to move to a hosting service different from theirs, you will not be able to take your site with you. I cannot recommend this company. Also, be sure to check with other churches who have used them. I checked with about 1/2 dozen, and only one was pleased.
Justin…interesting how you keep attacking fH even after you apologized in an email for your actions (I know someone who works there).
You also misrepresented the images issue in your attack. How about some honesty on your part?
Below was their response to your attack and misrepresentation re the robots:
Hi Justin, thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. I wanted to leave you a message to let you know that our development team is adjusting our robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the cgi-bin directory. This should remedy the issue. I can also speak from first hand experience in letting you know that our sites haven’t always had this indexing issue. Specifically occonline.ca, as a church I have spent many hours working with and are close personal friends of mine, their site search in Google actually returned 40-50 results in the last year on Google. As we do not know when or how Google and other search engines adjust their algorithms, there’s always a risk of things changing, and in this case, that happened.
I also wanted to address a few erroneous statements in your post to hopefully bring some clarity to faithHighway’s intentions and motivations. The reason we previously blocked the cgi-bin folder was not due to our servers not being up to par, but because our client content does not actually reside in that folder, only scripts appear in that folder, and to make our customer sites respond faster, we want to reduce server load in any way possible.
Also, the sites being effected are only sites built on our previous development platform. We stopped building sites on this platform about a year ago. As you can see, on our newer platform, sites such as http://www.meetgrace.org are fully indexed (see results of site search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=iN6&q=site%3Ameetgrace.org&cts=1261413234959&aq=f&oq=&aqi=)
We certainly would never want to hide the gospel. We’ve been in the business of serving the church for almost 10 years and can tell you the majority of our staff serves or has served in a leadership capacity in their local churches, so our heart is to make sure the church has the best tools, resources and abilities available for effective outreach online and in their community.
We appreciate your heart as well and look forward to resolving this for your church as well so your ministry can maximize every opportunity that you have to reach more people! Thanks, Greg
I am not the only one who has issues with faithhighway – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRgtV0mpsDI
watched the video…dude is not even a client but miffed about not rec’g a free DVD of commercials for churches. From his website, he is not even a church!
Did see that they had a bunch of testimonial videos that showed up afterwards at http://www.youtube.com/faithhighway.
No, he is upset because he says that faithHighway lied to him. And let’s see how open and honest faithHighway really is. They said to me:
“Remove the comments immediately or we will have no choice but to take swift, decisive action which includes posting your apology as well as additional correspondence that will show your inconsistent character in dealings with our company. We are also prepared to escalate the matter as necessary- we certainly will not stand idly by as you choose to flame faithHighway”