faithHighway Did not like their customer service Austin, Texas

I'd be happy to address those things. You mention how at www.southridge.org the media center is integrated into the website. That is true, but I want you to notice something. It does not use the SermonConnect "sermon flow" system that faithHighway promotes and talks about being award winning. An example of this is faithHighway's site example: http://sc.fhview.com/sc_customplayer/seriesitems/1/118124

If your church were to do video or use sermon series, you might be more inclined to want the sermon flow media setup. However, they don't integrate it into the site. This is even true with the faithHighway example of it - it isn't integrated into their site either.

My background is that of a staff Pastor.

I am sure there are many glowing reviews of faithHighway. For example, our former executive pastor gave one of these testimonies. He was offered some "free floating pages" in exchange for his testimony. Thus the many testimonies on the internet. I also understand that there are some genuine positive reviews. I chalk this up to simply not knowing the other options.

I don't recommend a cheap do-it-yourself option. There are several companies out there. Here are a couple in no order of preference:

http://www.faithconnector.com
http://www.siteorganic.com/

I don't believe faithHighway wants sites to not get traffic. Here is what I do know. When I complained about the robots file being put there without our permission, I was told:
1) That it was there because the server couldn't handle the number of hits and
2) They tried to sell me their Search Engine Optimization service

We no longer use faithHighway, and guess what: we rank on the first page for important search terms and I didn't know more about SEO really than I do now. The difference is we don't use faithHighway anymore.

faithHighway isn't all bad. There are some good designs and some of their sites are on good systems. That being said, they provided poor service and there are better options out there.

Whoa! I am shocked at this thread. Our church has been considering Faith Highway and this is not the feedback we have gotten from our peers who have used them in the past.

I can understand being frustrated with a product or service, but this all seems very vindictive. It also seems like the original author might be mis-informed. One of the Faith Highway sites we have been looking at is www.southridge.org. It looks like they use the media center, and it's embedded into the page.  I guess it makes me just wonder if that part of the author is incorrect, how much of the rest isn't true either.

For the author, I am curious of your background? I know Faith Highway has been around for years. I've been seeing them at conferences for years. I have a number of church planter associates who have used them and offered glowing reviews. I find it hard to believe a company that you claim is deliberately trying to keep their websites from being successful in search engines would stay in business this long... And on that note, wouldn't that be counter productive? To want their websites to perform poorly? How does that help their customers?

Like I said, we are strongly considering Faith Highway. Many pastors I know have used them and have been pleased. I know there are cheaper options out there, but my friends who use Faith Highway tell me the advice and help they get from their account managers makes it worth it, rather than cheap do-it-yourself websites. Just my 2 cents.

I am far from the only person unhappy with faithHighway. There is testimony after testimony of people upset with faithHighway as seen at christianincollege.com

And as far as Sermon Connect winning awards, that does not mean anything. If you look at a church with the Sermon Connect feature, you will notice that their "award winning sermon flow" feature isn't integrated into the site. It is stand alone. Who wants that?

I am far from the only person unhappy with faithHighway. There is testimony after testimony of people upset with faithHighway as seen at christianincollege.com

And as far as Sermon Connect winning awards, that does not mean anything. If you look at a church with the Sermon Connect feature, you will notice that their "award winning sermon flow" feature isn't integrated into the site. It is stand alone. Who wants that?

In addition to you being misleading about the robots issue as part of the original report, I looked up about their sermon connect player...they won an award by WFX for Best Overall Digital Church Product and for the Podcasting, Webcasting, and Website Streaming Media Solution: http://www.worshipfacilities.com/go.php/editorial/6446.

You need to stop being so dishonest and overcome your hate / bitterness and stop making such derogatory / dishonest comments. Funny that they have served 1000s of churches over 11 years...and you are the only client that claims to have been harassed or whatever.

If faithHighway wants to do right by us, I have told them to contact the pastor and offer him a full refund. We can make this right. Right now I believe faithHighway didn't want to make an honest effort. They only offered a refund or the "forms" feature. Not SermonConnect, not the design, not anything of significance.  It was actually insulting. The second I believe faithHighway has made things right with us and promises to not try to use intimidation on future clients (the real reason for this whole thing, I don't want others to go through what I did), I promise that will be reflected.

To the author...

Its upsetting to know that this issue has been taken so far. Yes I am an employee of the company. It doesn't matter who I am because I don't have any influence on how the company leadership responds to this issue, and you and I have never spoken. It seems, in my opinion, that this all boils down to you preferring some of the newer technology available in the WordPress platform, as evidenced by your company site as well as the work you've done for your clients.

Look, I could just as easily find reasons why people shouldn't use your company as you can ours. I could poke holes in some of your company's statements and call them false or misleading. The fact is that nobody at this company wants to make it difficult for our clients to be found online. Why would we? Aren't we all working towards the same goal of reaching people like the guy in california that thought a church plant had something to do with marijuana?

Come on man, we're both called to a higher standard. Let's take this offline and stop airing dirty laundry in public. You're in a position of leadership, and as the title of this post states, "you should care." Don't let your frustration blind you to the fact that what you post isn't just read by people in the church. How we communicate and conduct ourselves should show people that we are really about what we believe. (John 13:35)

I know you feel burned, and I truly wish that weren't the case. I also know you feel that it's your mission or duty to tell the world about this experience and to "stick it" to the big bad company that caused you problems. The difference is that we're trying to make things right, and all I've seen is that you're bent on causing us harm. 

You are a leader, and you must consider what message you are sending to people who follow you. I appeal to you in this way because I believe that somewhere you have to know that this isn't the best way to go about things. Just as this one situation you've had with our company doesn't characterize the entirety of all client experiences, I'm sure that what we're seeing of you isn't the totality of who you are as a person, a Christian, and a leader.

You should care because we all are responsible for how we treat each other, and we are responsible for the message we send to the world who is looking on and sees the church looking just as messed up as everyone else. It probably looks even more so because the church is "supposed to have it all together."

I know I've said a lot, but I'm doing this at 1:00am because I know that when I go to work today, I'm going to do the best I can to provide people with accurate information to help them reach people. Its what I always do, and if I notice that someone is giving incomplete or inaccurate information, I do my best to correct them so that our clients have the proper expectations.

I guess if you're going to spend a portion of your day defaming the work that I'm doing, well then that's your choice, but realize that you're only hurting your fellow brothers and sisters. As we will with everything else in life, (and we all have a lot) we'll have to give an account for how we've dealt with each other in this situation. I truly believe that your time could be better spent focusing on the people you're called to lead, or something else constructive, instead of this SEO-flame war you're conducting.

Just as a side note: The success story you're mocking is of a client who changed names and domain names, that's why it's not appearing when you go to the old domain name. They're still with us, and they're still reaching people. Go back and visit the link on our site and hopefully you'll see the site, which by the way you can google and find very easily by its name.

In closing, you can look at this and completely disregard what I'm saying. You can call it a guilt trip. You can mock it like you've been mocking the company. I wouldn't be surprised by any of it at this point because you are obviously very upset, and none of us are really our best selves when we're mad. You want to do all you can to feel vindicated, which I understand. All I can ask is that you choose to reconsider the way you're going about this, rather than being controlled by anger. Hopefully you can try again to work offline with your leadership and ours to make things better. In the end, I think that is the best way to do things, and I hope at some point, you'll decide to care.

The apology, which was over a year ago for a different issue, was because of receiving a message from Greg Johnson, head of faithHighway client relations. He said:
"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"

You can see how that would be intimidating and I didn't want a lawsuit. Now I don't care.

Interesting you accuse them of deceit...accusations are just a form of an excuse. Get a life dude!

You keep attacking fH even after you apologized in an email for your actions. You also misrepresented the images issue in your attack. How about some honesty on your part? They have addressed this before...you even acknowledged it publicly! See you devoted a whole blog to them...how about a little more "christian" there...more than just in name only?

faithHighway is being deceitful in placing an "apology" that they made me say when they led me to believe they would sue me. That email was over a year ago. I have many reasons for being upset with faithHighway, including:

For instance, you told me "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."

Here is what I would like clarified.  In the email you provide where you messaged me, you admit there is a problem with the way you had the robots file set up. However, on your website (http://mediaoutreach.com/2010/02/response-to-joe-kennedy/) you say: The robots.txt issue copied and pasted above is not quite accurate. The file in question did not actually block content on their site or any sites built by faithHighway, otherwise none of our sites would be found in Google. What it did block was an engine (cgi-bin) that retrieves files used to display the site in order to bolster performance. Thus, the claims above are inaccurate. After explaining to the client and making some minor modifications at the client’s request, the client, on his own blog, acknowledged satisfaction with the changes

Obviously faithHighway is trying to have it both ways.

Justin,
Wow! We were surprised to see this comment pop up all of the sudden, despite our attempts to apologize, offer a partial refund, and provide ample explanation.   We are also very surprised to see your blog of “faithhighway reviews,” which has taken comments completely out of context to propagate your agenda. After our interaction with you in Feb. 2010, we thought, by your apology that you sent us,  that we had reconciled. We addressed your issues and you even mentioned it in your apology. We have been in business over 11 years and have successfully helped thousands and thousands of ministries. We know we aren’t perfect, but we also know we aren’t terrible either. We are more than happy to make right, if we have wronged you. Please contact us at feedback@faithhighway.com  and we will respond appropriately.
 Here is your response to us (faithHighway) last February.
  -------- Original Message --------
Subject: Apology
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010
17:16:02 -0600
 From: Justin Grice <justin@grovechurch.com>
 To: Greg Johnson <greg.johnson@faithhighway.com>

 Dear Greg Johnson, I tried to call you and couldn't get in touch.  I wanted to take a moment to write to you.  Please ignore any other emails I sent in haste.  While the Pastoral team has decided to stand with me on the issues between us and Faithhighway, I want to put the matter to rest.  The services gained from your company may not have suited our needs, but I am sure that Faithhighway is exactly what some church wants.  We had a breakdown in communication and some of that is due to me.  I want you to know that we did not intend on using images that we do not have the rights to.  In looking at the email transcript between us, I see where the mix-up occurred.  When I asked if it was possible to get our images off our account (meaning our personal pictures), you said no because of copyright (meaning faithhighway's images).  Since I knew that we had the right to our pictures, I dismissed this email.  When I realized during the conversation what you meant, I quickly took them down.  The pastor, Jackie Bryant, who used to be on staff was also in graphic design and I was not aware that it was not ours.  I am glad that faithhighway has also acted on their end by emailing us the files I asked for. But this is more than just a business thing.  If we were two nonbelievers, the behavior would have been expected.  I apologize for how I treated you.  Though I believe my complaint could be posted legally and was fairly accurate, I have taken it down in good faith. As far as Joe Kennedy, I do not know him personally, believe it or not.  He is a friend of a friend and got our story.  I asked him to take down the account of what happened.  Though he may continue to say stuff about faithhighway, I have backed away from that.  I am thankful that it seems he was the cause of helping us both understand what happened with the images when he clarified that we were wanting our personal pictures.  Again, I am sorry this had to happen.  If you happen to be at the NEXT Conference March 1st in Warner Robins, Georgia, maybe I will see you there.
Your Friend,
 Justin Grice
 Connection Pastor http://www.grovechurch.com

A church plant is a brand new church. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_plant

What the hell is a church plant?   Maybe a fern?
I've heard of a church that uses marijuana - is that what you are tring to complain about?