Speaking of Clover
While my work with Schema Consulting Services (http://theschema.net) allows me to do lots of custom development work and learn new technologies, I always love discovering others’ solutions, especially ones as slick and elegant as Clover (http://www.cloversites.com). Clover is a turnkey website design, development, and hosting solution for church organizations who need quality, professional looking websites that can still be easily updated and modified.
The beauty of Clover lies within its Adobe Flash based platform. This gives Clover users a consistent and feature rich content management interface across different browsers and platforms, as well as integrated multimedia support.
Of course, the Clover website designs are beautiful themselves, giving any ministry an artistic, professional look rich in color and pictures. The Clover platform also gives users a simple events calendar and media player for posting sermons online.
Unfortunately, Flash is also Clover’s biggest drawback: search engine optimization (SEO). While Clover claims to be “optimized for search engines,” this really boils down to the containing HTML page incorporating some description and keywords meta tags—not entirely effective if the robot can’t actually parse any of the web site’s content. In looking at some of the featured websites, they don’t appear to include robot.txt files or other ways of helping search engines peruse the sites. There is still much work for the Clover team to do before their clients’ sites are actually optimized.
I first learned of Clover about a year ago while browsing around the web in search of some nice church website designs. I was immediately impressed with the design templates and the functionality of their content management system, The Greenhouse, but I felt the websites were limited in flexibility and content.
Enter Greenhouse 2.0. The Clover guys (and gals?) have been hard at work on their next version of The Greenhouse, and it looks like they’ve really put some heart into it. This new version will include a more feature rich media play, an improved calendar, the ability to create photo galleries and slide shows, and some other odds and ends. While The Greenhouse 2.0 is still only a third of the way complete, it looks very promising and I am excited to see how it turns out. My only concern is that they might not make any improvements on the SEO front; I suppose only time will tell.
Update: According to Ben (a Clover team member) Clover will include (and to some degree already does) features to allow search engines to index the sites. They’re making it more customizable, as well, which will really help make the site truly useful for users as they search around. Needless to say, I’m sold on the Clover platform.
