Clover Church Websites
When Sandals Church started we hand coded websites like this one.
For the year 2000, I was actually proud of this piece of work.
Well churches do not have to suffer anymore.
There are a few guys who were like 11 in the year 2000 that are making things sexy fly for your churches online experiences.
Introducing Clover.
We believe in equipping the church to do the work God has called it to do.
We know that your calling is huge… That it takes precidence over everything else in your life. Whether you are a church planter, pastor, or para-church leader; a major part of your ministry is making your heart known to the community and demographic you’re trying to minister to.
We believe that Clover will provide you with a means of communicating your heart and vision to your community, and it will do it in a fashion that is current, clean and fresh.
Our heart is that you are freed up to do the work of Christ in this world…
A calling that we don’t take lightly.
Clover has invented the most intuitive management system I have ever seen. Putting you in the driver seat.
And seriously. The sites they have built look amazing.
Head over to Clover and take a few of their demo sites for a spin.
Technorati Tags: Cloversites
RAIN IT DOWN
Is that a Ragamuffin Sweater Vest?
actually, no, my church’s website does NOT suck. but I like your design.
http://betheriver.com/
Sweater vest? Really? Someone should design a Raggamuffin Soul t-shirt based on that.
we’re currently using an iWeb site that I designed and don’t have time to maintain. So, yes, it does SUCK.
oddly enough, I just saw the Clover ad here last night and fell in love with their sites. We may be making the switch!
Our designer (ask for Elliot): http://asubtleweb.com/
I know this great little design boutique called Updatable. They do sweet church websites. They did our church’s website. Plus, I think the owner of the company is on staff at a church or something.
*wink*
http://www.robspangler.com will be working on our new design
i like the look of our website, but the navigation is not too good….but it is ok.
we have a web guy that does it…it is a huge undertaking.
this stuff is not easy to do well. mean dean used to give lots of advice on the topic: http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/
That is a NorthFace fleece vest jerks. I work that crap loud and proud
Me, myself and two volunteers (when I can get them). Talking about DIY – the volunteers hand-coded from scratch our back-end CMS system.
Our site sucks but only in small caps ’cause the design is fine but just a little too far ahead of our people. That is, looks great on laptop and flat-panel screens, completely illegible on CRT monitors. And we sure found out how many people were still on CRT’s!
Re-design under way.
We’re using clover. So far we really like it. We are patiently waiting for upgrades like video streaming but it is very simple to use.
check our clover out at http://www.Rockchurchqc.com
No, our website doesn’t suck. Thanks to our friends at http://www.churchplantmedia.com/ it actually looks like we know what we are doing.
A past youth leader designed our site, it’s been the same since, exactly the same. That’s right, no one’s even updated it.
HEY THERE…… Is $1000 a good deal? What do you guys think?
You may view it at http://www.sevensdchurch.com/
Speak Creative out of Memphis. They are amazing guys, and very focused on helping the church.
http://speakcreative.com/
http://www.fbcsmyrna.org/
Hi from Vilanova, Barcelona, Spain.
Our website is fine, it could be better for sure but since we don’t have budget for a great website, and we’re all volunteering it’ll be enough for us for a very looong time.
You guys can check it at http://www.iglesiadelgarraf.com
If you’re asking about our personal site (http://www.beautifulcanvas.org)…well, that would be me. It’s nothing too fancy but it suits our purposes just fine.
If you are asking about our church website (http://www.church-redeemer.org), that was designed by Site Organic (http://www.siteorganic.com). It’s prices are a little bit more expensive than Clover’s prices. However, I think Site Organic offers more features. That being said, Clover’s front-end designs are much nicer (cleaner) than Site Organic’s designs.
Site Organic does a lot of damage. They are excellent salesmen and lousy programmers. Tech support is lacking to say the least.
Hi Jimmy –
We take support (and more importantly, ministry RESULTS) very seriously at SiteOrganic. When clients aren't pleased, we need to know about it so that we can make things right. That's how we run our ministry and our business. Feel free to contact me directly anytime. Since it sounds like you are a client of ours, you should have my direct contact info.
Thanks!
Brad Hill
Our website SUCKS REAL BAD, if you go to the church it sucks, if you don’t go to the church it sucks, no info to speak of, no links to small groups, BUT THAT IS GOING TO CHANGE SOON!!! can you say 360 Hubs
Our site is done 100% in WordPress … was actually featured in a recent blog post at TonyMorganLive.Com, which was cool … what an honor .. you should see the Google Analytics spike for that one!
The site is
http://www.sscommunitychurch.com
Clover’s stuff looks good, though – fo sho.
i do
Wordpress (free) is cool, but its hard to get all the features and themes you need for a church. But there is a new theme coming out soon – http://www.churchpresspro.com which should make things alot easier and cheaper for many churches…
My church site (http://www.theembassyofgod.com)
which I designed, uses – Interspire Website Publisher – http://www.interspire.com/articlelive/
Sorry: http://www.theembassyofgod.com
Also check out : http://www.freshchurchsites.com/
I used to hand code all our stuff, but we moved to Joomla a couple of years ago so I could try and get the other staff to lend a hand.
That hasn’t worked out so well. We’re now seriously considering Clover, and are waiting for finance committee approval.
If they say “no,” then I’m going to move the whole site to WordPress.
http://www.churchmedia.cc does mine.
Our church plant got on the Clover bandwagon early. Customer service is great, the CMS is simple, and the sites look great.
Check our site out @ http://www.Courageous.tv
-Shaun & Crew
Clover looks very cool. I like what they’ve done. At New Life in Renton,WA. we use http://www.churchwebworks.com
It’s a template system that we customize for us and make it really sing for us. We love it!
http://www.newliferenton.com
It’s very inexpensive also? but enough about that…seriously…the clover stuff looks cool!
Our site is pretty cool, I’d have to say. http://www.dccnet.org. We picked up a template like Clover offers and it works well for us. My personal site, http://www.howtoheargodspeaking.com, is an iWeb deal but I tweaked it a bit (no html meddling, just within the features you can do a lot).
http://www.fiveninetylabs.com
100% Wordpress, check out http://www.lighthousecollective.com.
Nice, Clean, easy-to-use, but really REALLY bad on having Google crawl your site.
Designers today know so little about SEO that all your traffic and site promotion has to be done by word-of-mouth and not searching for … “real awesome church in atlanta ga”
Save Flash and Ajax for games, not web design.
@Eric – I second that. Flash ain’t cool, but I still love AJAX, when used in moderation.
I think that whole thing about “Flash being just for games” is a bit 1995…
I started poking around a bit, and check out what they did with the typical Flash SEO issue. Basically, every one of their sites is displayed as HTML to Google.
http://www.speakingofclover.com/2008/06/search-engine-optimization-in-flash-really/
Clover designs look great but the features are pretty basic. Also, keep in mind that many of their designs rely on large photography. The irony is that if you're a small church you probably don't have lots of high-quality, original images. If you're a bigger church, then you probably need more functionality than Clover provides. Their CMS system is very slick however. It would probably be a good plan to think about starting on Clover, then move up to something like SiteOrganic Express.
I think they charge $1000 to tie you in for a couple years, because you, most likely, will outgrow what they offer sooner than 2 years. Clover sites, being so limited in what they offer might serve as a limited brochure-type site, or might serve as a short-term event site, if you have the bucks. Given their limited functionality, they advise creating a mashed-up offering as the best way to go, which it's not if you're concerned about branding. Also, their sites don't translate to mobile. You might be presented with text that you have to zoom in on and scroll horizontally back and forth to read it all. And, if it's SEO friendly, I'm not sure why they don't show up higher in search results. While flash-based front-ends are not new, their flash CMS is slick…but your website visitors aren't using the cms; they're viewing your content. When you're trying to view content, all the flash-based transitions and such just get in the way.
Clover is very cool – and great for large and small churches. I run http://www.freshchurchsites.com and most of those sites don't compare to some of Clover's sites. Check out a quick summary of Clover here: http://www.getClover.com
Excellent YouTube post ! thanks for sharing. I’ll be adding your blog to my reader.
Juan
Don’t “move up” to SiteOrganic express. They charge you two hours labor to add your church logo.