FaithHighway Web Design – Do NOT use them

December 20, 2009 at 9:21 am | In Daily Life | 14 Comments
Tags: church websites, faithHighway, web design

Let me say that this is my personal recommendation and not that of my church.

If you are considering looking for a company to develop and host your website, I do not recommend that you use faithHighway. I don’t know anybody at faithhighway and have never worked there. My only experience with them is as a client.

If you want a website that actually will rank well in search engines, obviously you need the search engines to scan your webpages. Faithhighway places a file called robots.txt on your website (without you knowing it) that actually tells search engines to not look at any of your supporting webpages! Why would faithhighway do that? Because it causes them to not have to have extra computing power (i.e. buying more servers for example) if they had extra traffic. But obviously you want traffic on your website.

If you don’t believe me, check this out. I will give you an example of one of their clients. I will even use a client with an attractive design since my complaint is not over their design.

Here is a website that faithhighway designed: http://www.occonline.ca/ And here is the robots file that faithhighway places on their clients webpages: http://www.occonline.ca/robots.txt (Note added 12/22/2009 – this robots file no longer exists as Faithhighway has fixed the problem)

Notice on the robots file that it says:

“User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

When it says “Disallow”, it is telling google not to look somewhere. When it says /cgi-bin/ it is telling google not to look at any page with /cgi-bin/ in its web address. Back to the website now: http://www.occonline.ca/ Look around at its pages. It has a page called “About us”. Let’s look at it. When you click the link, it takes you to this page: http://www.occonline.ca/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=FaithHighway/10000/7000/231OS/welcome

I bolded it to make it more noticable for you. The about us page is located in the cgi-bin folder. In fact, all of this website’s supporting pages are in this folder! Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all being told not to look at the about us page and every other ministry page.

Do you plan on putting the gospel on your website so that those desperately looking for God can find it and get saved? Guess what. Faithhighway is telling google and other search engines not to send any of them your way. Why? Because faighhighway’s server’s aren’t up to par. What really gets me is they advertise on their site on the why faithhighway page under reliability that they have “over 99.9999% uptime”. Of course they do if they keep people from finding their clients sites and therefore have no data traffic on their servers! What really gets me is they have articles on how to optimize your pages for search engines when they must know that they block search engines from scanning those very pages they are telling you how to “optimize”.

That isn’t right.

I strongly feel that if you can’t say something nice, you probably shouldn’t say anything, but in this case I think that what faithhighway is doing is wrong for their clients and these poor clients who don’t understand how search engines work or coding are gonna look at the pretty website faithhighway made for them and think they did a great job – when all along faithhighway has been keeping people from finding that website.

- Justin

Note: Since this incident, faithhighway has fixed the robots issue, but then tried to turn around and sell us an expensive “search engine optimization” service. Then they held our images hostage when I moved to a different service – very unprofessional. I do not recommend them. Added 2/12/2010

14 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

I would recommend using U.S. Consumer Net . It is owned by a friend. They have been around for a while and do good work. They may not be the cheapest around but you get what you pay for.

Comment by TheDeeZone — December 20, 2009 #
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,

Comment by Greg Johnson — December 21, 2009 #
I look forward to working with you and will of course remove anything I find out I posted incorrectly. Thanks faithhighway. We will talk over the phone tomorrow.

Comment by Justin — December 21, 2009 #
Justin,
From an IT (Information and Technology industry) Perspective, it is most difficult in finding the perfect balance of services for your clients. Often this is seen in the Security vs. Usability issue. I am sure that FaithHighway has their clients intrests in mind but how best to find the solution to fit their needs?

Well, you just did about the best thing to both help people make an informed decision about using FH’s services, and help FaithHighway finetune their services to better fit their client’s needs.

Someone may think you have picked on FaithHighway but I see you are pointing out some issue with their services and I am glad to see what seems like a willingness to change. It looks like FH is adapting to their clients wants and needs, as every business should.

I hope this works out for the best, for all involved.

God bless,
-D

Comment by ditchu — December 21, 2009 #
also looks like a hosting issue not a design issue.

If they do great design then hire them to design but move to a different host if that works best for you as the client.

I used to design for people but suggest a few different hosts, each offering slightly different services and level of security.
netfirms for hosting, and bravenet for special services or service add-ons, have never let me or my clients down, although there are loads more now that I have been out of the web scean for a few years.

As for design: Designers seem to be a dime a dozen (there are many to choose from) but you often get what you pay for. If you want a bargin for desent design look for budding designers, often highschool seniors with web-nack that have fun drawing up web pages, you can offer them projects they can use for marking their skill in the future and they will take less over all pay.
Some quick tips for hireing designers:
1. set a max limit. even of the designer is paied by the hour set a max expense limit. make it reasonable but set it up front.
2. Less is more. Just because someone can do a lot on the web does not mean it is good to put it all on your page. You should have a spicific reason for every element on your page. Even the background color and text colors are choices you need to support with reasoning. It is a representive of you, like putting onclothing and make-up, You don’t want to go overboard and do too much, like dressing in a suit & Tie to goto church but slaping on makeup like a member of KISS (white face paint base with wild black bloches ect) it’s just too much.
3. If you can, look at a protfolio of other web projects done by the designer. Often you can get online and goto the pages and test them out for both function and style.

Good luck to all and God bless your endevors,
-Ditchu

Comment by ditchu — December 21, 2009 #
Thanks ditchu for the tips.

Comment by Justin — December 22, 2009 #
Forget the SEO issue – why are you using FaithHighway? It’s like leasing a car you will never own, have very little control on how it works, and will pay a fortune for it in the long haul. We started to use FaithHighway and stopped when we looked at the contract – after the non-fundable deposit – and decided the lack of ownership, control, unbelievable monthly costs. And after we stopped they decided to start billing us even though we never signed the contract or continued past the early design phase. Take a look at their contract – pepperred with AS IS everywhere add on monthly costs that can change any time. After the first years “discount rate” would be over the monthly costs would be nearly $200/month compared to our normal $10/month. So after 10 years what do you have? You have an outdated web site that they could “fix” at $100/hour and would have spent nearly $24,000 for something you don’t own. Maybe this is a great choice for churches that have money to burn and think that by choosing an affinity (faith related) web design company they are getting the best deal. Maybe they think they have no choice as their technical staff is limited – as ours is. I have personally looked at FaithHighway’s reference sites and found several to not be a part of FaithHighway’s family anymore – wonder why?

Comment by ralph — February 12, 2010 #
The $24,000 costs mentioned previously did not include the $10,000 cost of creating the website. So it is really $34,000 for a rental website. Yes, we are going to have design costs – less than half of FaithHighway cost. And we still use our $10/month hosting company and have more features that have no monthly charge at all. God is good.

Comment by ralph — February 12, 2010 #
I agree Ralph, faithhighway is a terrible service. I feel that they go to conferences and prey on pastors that don’t know better. Shame on them.

Comment by Justin — February 12, 2010 #
Solution to the problem: have me come on staff as minister of technology.

Comment by TheDeeZone — February 13, 2010 #
Dee-

You are welcome to join. Although my job here could be classified as a minster of technology along with a few other areas – I have been compensated thru spiritual enrichment as opposed to money. The idea of freelancing as a remote minister of technology for compensation is not out of the realm of possibility. If FaithHighway can run a business of renting websites to churches, perhaps there is a market for a Christian Geek Squad supplying reasonably priced services to churches.

Comment by Ralph — February 13, 2010 #
When I graduated from seminary I worked for a company that did that. Unfortunately, many churches do not really understand the need to have someone or a service to provide quality media including web, print media and epseically PowerPoint. I have had a few friends get similar positions with very large churches. It is sad that many most churches would rather have sub standard media because they don’t realize how affordable it would be to have quality work.

Comment by TheDeeZone — February 14, 2010 #
Your so right..I see many churches settle for less than real quality work. The church I am at uses MediaShout which is a decent presentation program but in the hands of a person with little computer skills is a real waste. Sometimes you get what you pay for – or rather don’t pay for. Amazing the money they can afford for organists but not a dime for technical people. I have seen the bigger churches do much better – not just because the money is there – but the see home the technology improves the services for the congregation and helps to get God’s message out.

Comment by Ralph — February 14, 2010 #
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has issues with the way FH conducts business.

I recently inherited the ‘website’ from the person who handled it in the past. Why did they step down? FH, and our pastor being too bone-headed to listen to the people around him. It took FH months to produce yet another cookie-cutter site. Their sermonconnect service is a joke (horrible video quality, you have to handle the FLV conversion, and the whole management interface is atrocious), their uptime is an outright -lie-, and I could go on.

Don’t get me started on the security of their systems. Anyone who can edit pages has root (yes, root) access to their systems. Think of the fun a deviant could have with that.

I have urged (multiple times) that we ditch this so-called service.

How do I know that their bandied %99.99 uptime is a lie? They had a more than 36h outage this past weekend on some of their systems. 99.99 would be less than 12h down in a calendar year. They’ve hit their outtage quota for the next THREE YEARS.

Comment by NoWayNoHow — February 16, 2010 #