Announcing: Clover for Businesses
You’ve been asking for it for a couple of years, and now we can officially answer “Yes!”
Over the past 2 years we’ve received this question literally hundreds of times: “Can I use Clover for my small business?”
Our answer has typically been something like: “Yeah, you can. You’ll just have to be creative with using the tools created for ministries on your business site.” But now, we have opened up cloversites.com to any small business, artist, non-profit, or industry you can think of. The internet-wide problem of not being able to have a decent looking site that you can manage without spending a fortune is now over.
We’ve created an experience at cloversites.com so that a visitor no longer has to do the mental gymnastics to see how Clover will fit for their specific industry. We’ve done the work to allow anyone looking for a website for their organization to have a true Clover experience when visiting our site. Also to help, we’ve just posted a bunch of new Green Thumbs for you to see how businesses have been using Clover. Check them out: Green Thumbs
Here’s what we’ve changed:
1. Cloversites.com Home Page: Before today, when you typed in cloversites.com you got the line “We make websites for growing ministries”, along with a video that was very much ministry-specific. Now when you visit our site, you will receive a generic home page with the tagline of “We make websites for people, not programmers”. If you’ve visited our site in the last 3 months or so, you will still get the “ministry experience”, because we put a cookie on your browser to say that’s what you care about… That will make sense more as you read #2.
2. Demos: With the pressure now of showing people how they can actually use Clover for their business, we went through the (rather tedious) work of making all of our existing demos represent a specific industry. For example, Sunset was turned into an Italian restaurant website, The Stone was turned into a band’s website, and Shadowridge was turned into a civil engineering firm’s website. We felt with a huge span of industry-specific sites (rather than a generic, “small-business” example), we could clearly show people how Clover can be a fit for them.
If you go to the websites page, you’ll notice a new drop-down arrow that allows you to cater your experience to your industry. This will shuffle the more industry-specific site designs to the front of the demos, so you don’t have to search around to find out how you can use Clover for a specific type of business. We’ll also remember what industry you are a part of, so next time you go to cloversites.com, you’ll receive the same industry-specific experience.
Oh yeah, like I said before- If you have entered into cloversites.com before today, you will only have the “ministry” experience. This will mean that you will still get every demo as an example church, and all testimonies will be from ministries using Clover. All future entrants to cloversites.com/church will receive the same, deluxe treatment.
Here’s why you should care:
1. Clover Friends: If you haven’t signed up for Clover Friends, do so now! Clover Friends is our affiliate program that allows you to get $100 every time someone purchases a website because of you. It’s a pretty amazing program that was created to say a great big “Thanks!” to everyone who has been telling other people about Clover.
But here’s why Clover Friends is so huge now… The majority of us probably only know 2-3 churches that we might have influence on when it comes to their web presence. If you’re signed up for Clover Friends you’ve probably already told them, and received your check. But think of how many people you know that need a website for their small business? Off the top of my head, I can name 10-15 people. We’re pretty convinced that you could actually make a living off Clover Friends now…
New Site Designs
Along with this new expansion, we’re launching two new site designs: Rock Point and Harvest. Check them out when you get a chance.
So that’s the exciting news. We’re pretty stoked to be releasing this much-needed tool into the market.
We hope the rest of the world finds Clover to be as great a fit as the church does. We will still be releasing new, free updates to you soon, so stay tuned for that.
Posted on July 29th, 2010 under Company News by Jim with 10 comments.
10 Comments
Just wanted to say that this news is a real Godsend. My wife and I are beginning to piece together a local coffee shop and Christian book store, and I had heard of Clover through some of the ministry sites I frequent. The shuffling of the sites to make it more usable for businesses is much appreciated, and if we conclude that a top-end website is actually a good investment, I’m sure that we’ll use Clover, especially since the Greenhouse makes it much less of a time investment.
One of the things I am considering moving forward with is attempting to use the website to actually sell local music and ebooks. Is it possible to set up such an interface on a Clover site? I love the music player and the ability to share files easily, and both of those functions would be great for demoing things, but it would be nice to be able to create a fairly comprehensive store interface whereby visitors could purchase albums and such.
Thanks for the compliments on Clover. We definitely think it’ll be great for business, too.
We don’t have a shopping cart solution built in to Clover, but we do recommend a separate service that’s really easy to use. Check out Big Cartel (www.bigcartel.com). It’s perfect for selling albums, like you mentioned.
I’ve had my cloversite up and running for a couple of weeks now and I love it — I just wish I would have known about the changes (to be more small-business-friendly) sooner. I’d hate to find a better/more suitable site and then have to pay more to switch… We’ll see, I guess.
(oh, and the only problem we’ve run into has been that we don’t have a real good way of showing multiple full-size pictures next to descriptions of our items for sale…)
By the way, you have the best customer service of any business I’ve ever come across. Thanks!
Hey Ashlee – I’m glad you love your site. Don’t worry too much about getting it a couple weeks ago. The only thing we changed for our new launch is the way we display the demo sites, so the site you have is still just as business friendly as it’s always been.
And we definitely hear you about putting pictures and descriptions up. We’re working right now on a feature called the “List Page” that will do just that. When it comes out, you’ll get it for free, as usual.
Thanks for the response, Ben. I checked out bigcartel.com and it definitely looks interesting. Considering $30 a month would cover hosting and webpage with you guys and store interface with Big Cartel, that’s a very reasonable price.
I don’t think we will be launching the website for a year at least, since there’s still a lot of planning to do on the business side of things. Just count my vote that I would love to see a store interface on Clover if you were able to develop such a thing!
The sites look great! Is it now possible to enter Japanese text?
Hey Jay-
Thanks for the feedback! It is not possible to use Japanese on your Clover site, since we still only support Western European characters and alphabets.
We switched over to Clover in June after paying $250/month the last 5 years. I cannot say enough how incredible Greenhouse is. You guys have managed to pack a lot of power into an incredibly simple program. I’m real excited to see you expand to businesses as well. Now a lot more people will benefit from the service you provide. I can’t wait to see the growth it brings you.
On a side note, do we have any sort of time frame on the list pages, photo albums, and forms? I’m already salivating on the way we can integrate them into our site.
Thanks Mike. We’re proud of the Greenhouse, too
We don’t have a timeline that we can announce for the features, but I we are actively working a couple of them at once and like always we’re trying to get them out as soon as we can. Most likely we’ll release our simple stats feature first and then the list page next.
Hey Mike-
Wow, I am so happy that you found Clover and we are happy hear that you are enjoying your site. I think we are as equally excited as you are about these new features we are rolling out with, and I can assure you that we are working hard to get these features out as soon as we can! No release dates as of yet though.