Speaking of Clover.

Social Links On Your Clover Site

We know this feature was a bit under the radar, but we’re excited to get this new way of connecting your Clover website to your various forms of social media into your hands.

This is a feature we know a lot of you have been wanting for a while now, and have even been using some full pages and even logo space to point people towards your social media presence. But not anymore… Introducing our new “Social Links” feature!

This feature allows you to have a section on your website dedicated to providing links to your various forms of social media. They are located in different places in each of the different site designs… Below is an example of social links on the “Neue” site design.

To add this feature to your Clover site, go to your Greenhouse Dashboard and go to the “Site Settings” tab and you’ll see a button titled “Social Links”. You can add this new feature to your site here.

I created a quick walkthrough video highlighting this new feature. Check it out if you’d like:

We give you the ability in your Greenhouse Dashboard to not only customize the location these links point to, but even choose from a wide variety of icons and customize the directions you give your visitor when they rollover your icon.

The most common uses are pointing your visitors to your Facebook page, Twitter account, or other social media profiles. The feature will work great for that, but it can also be used for a ton of other things too… Here are some other (more creative) ways of using this new feature:

Link to any type of page on any social network. For example, you can link to your Facebook photos instead of your Facebook wall.  You basically have the ability to link to any public URL you can find… So get creative!

Link to an email address by simply entering it in the URL field. Here’s how: Choose “Other” as the service, enter the email address in the url field, and then make the title something like “Contact Us”.  You can use any icon you’d like, although the mail envelope might be the most appropriate…

Consider linking to the html/mobile version of your site and using the “accessibility” icon (the man in the circle). The url is just your website address with “?view=mobile” tacked onto the end.

Just some extra ideas with this new feature. Be sure to let us know if you have any questions. Enjoy!

New Site Design: Venture

We randomly snuck this one in over this past month… We’ve had the Venture site design actually designed for about 2 years now, but haven’t put the finishing touches on it until just now (great job Matt & Kirby).

Venture is a super clean and simple site, and makes good use of the font “Archer“. If you haven’t messed with it yet, check it out in our demo today.

Form Reporting For Your Clover Forms

After launching our Form Page a little while ago, one of the biggest requests we received with the new feature was the ability to have reports off every form that was created. This basically means that we provide you with a way to store all the information you receive off your form in one location, and give you the ability to view it and/or download.

Jason (one of our developers) started working on this feature right after launch of the Forms Page, and as of last week this feature is available to you on any of your forms.

You need to activate reporting on any forms you want reports for. In order to activate reporting on your form, go into the form you’ve created, then click “form settings”, and check the box titled “Activate Reporting”.

Once you’ve selected this option, reporting on this form will be enabled. Keep in mind that you just enabled it, so any previous submissions won’t be in this report… Only future submissions.

You’ll also have the ability to password protect the download page for your reports. We suggest you do this, especially if the info you’re collecting is anywhere close to being confidential. You can set up a different password for each form report you have if you’d like- it’s really up to you. Also, this password can be different than your Greenhouse password, so you can give it to people in your organization without giving them control of your site.

Once you have submissions that you want a report of, click the “Download Report” button on the form settings page. This will take you to the page that allows you to download your report. If you’ve created a password for this report, you’ll have to enter it before proceeding.

This page will be the location where you can download your report. Make sure you bookmark this URL so you don’t have to go into your form settings every time you want to access this information. We make a .CSV version of your report so you can open it in any application you want (ex: Microsoft Excel, Numbers, Google Docs).

If for some reason you change the info on your form, we automatically start saving a brand new report with your new info. This ensures that if you end up changing a field, you’re not stuck trying to decipher which content was from before, and which is applied to the new field.

We have a page in the help center dedicated to Form Reporting Tips. Check it out if you’d like, and as always feel free to shoot us an email if any questions come up.

Google Domain Verification

Not the most sexy of new features, but for those who’ve needed to verify to Google that you own your domain, this domain verification process used to be a time-consuming and techy process. We’ve made it super easy for you in your Dashboard to complete this verification process. Domain verification is needed if you want to use some of Google’s services (like Google Apps and Webmaster Tools).

All you need to do to get to your Google Domain Verification settings is go to the “Site Settings” tab in your Greenhouse Dashboard and click the button titled “Google Domain Verification”.

Once you’re there, you just paste the “Meta Tag Code” Google gives you, click “Save”, and you’re done. Just like that.

Browser Icon (Favicon) available on your site

About a month ago we launched a feature in your Clover Dashboard that allows you to add a browser icon (also known as a “favicon”) to your website. A favicon is the little 16 x 16 pixel image that shows up in web browsers when someone visits a website. They show up differently in each browser (see pics below), but all modern browsers support them. Here are examples of cloversites.com in:

Firefox:

Chrome:

and Safari:

Not all sites have them (or even want them), but for a while now people have asked about the possibility of having this little feature on their Clover website. We’ve thought about adding this feature for a while, and never quite got around to it till now. Thanks for your patience everyone… Especially you, Justin, since you were the first to request this feature!

This feature is pretty subtle, but for those designers out there this is a big deal. This means that most times when people bookmark your Clover site, your site’s title (which you can change in the Dashboard too) as well as this icon will show up in the menu. Just a little branding help for you guys… And for those non-designers who still want to have a cool icon next to their URL, have no fear- it’s super easy to add. Just go to you your Clover Dashboard, and under your “Site Settings” button you’ll find a new button called “Browser Icon (Favicon)”. This will give you the easy steps to add this icon on your site.

Overview of New Features

As most of you know by now, we’ve launched a bunch of new features over the past few weeks. As usual, we’ve done a not-so-great of job communicating what we’ve done on our blog… It seems that our giftedness really is in the creation of the feature, not necessarily blogging about it. Oh well.

With that being said, I’m going to do some individual posts for the next little while highlighting these new features. Hopefully the following posts show you a feature you didn’t notice before (or didn’t care about), and/or give you some ideas on how you can make your Clover site a little more robust.

Two New Features: Social Links and Form Reporting

Along with the rest of the features we’ve been releasing recently, we’re launching two more today!

Form Reporting

This was the most requested addition to the new form page feature. As of right now, you can enable reporting on any of your form pages, and we’ll start storing all the submissions that come in. Then you can download a spreadsheet report that combines all the submissions from that form.

Check it out by going to the settings on any form page that you have (in your Greenhouse), or feel free to try it in a demo site. Here is a quick article with some form reporting tips.

Social Links

Easily add social media links on your site. In your Dashboard you can now set up links to your social networking sites by simply going to the “Site Settings” tab, then clicking “Social Links”. This new features adds icons on your site that link to each of your profiles or pages.

We know a lot of you have been using your logo space and even have entire pages dedicated to pointing your visitors in the direction of your social media, so now you don’t have to jimmy-rig it anymore!

I made this quick video showing you how to set it up. We hope you enjoy this awesome new feature:

Recent Features

Hey guys -

Here’s a quick update of what we’ve been doing for the past month. We’ve got a significant amount of the photo page feature built, the form page reporting tool is also getting close, and we’re trying to finish up a new feature that will let you put social networking links on your site. All three of those features will launch one after another in the coming weeks!

Also, we launched several little things at the same time as the form page, but we never publicized them. Here’s a rundown:

- Favicons! You can now change the little icon that appears next to the title of your site at the top of your browser window. For you designers out there, we know your hearts are swelling with joy.

- Super-easy Google domain verification. For some of Google’s services (like Google Apps and Webmaster Tools), you have to prove to Google that you own your domain. This has always been an annoyingly techie process, but we just made it so you can copy and paste one piece of text and it’s done!

- New Site Design: Venture. It’s clean and conservative… and it’s one of my new favorites. Check it out on the websites page.

To add a favicon to your site, or to use the new google verification tool, go to the settings page on your Greenhouse Dashboard. We hope you enjoy these new little features while we get ready to launch some more big ones!

Publishing Issue

I hate writing posts like this, but I wanted to let everyone know about the issue that came up today. We were finishing the very last steps of a big database upgrade that we’ve been working on for the past two weeks. The upgrade was made to ensure that all our sites continue to run as quickly as possibly, and it all went really smoothly, until this last change.

At about 12:20pm PST we made a small but crucial mistake that broke the Publish button in the Greenhouse for all our sites. Fortunately, all changes in the Greenhouse were still being saved, they just couldn’t be published to your live site.

We started working on a fix right away, but it ended up being one of the first times we had an error that we couldn’t fix immediately. I’m guessing most of you don’t care about the technical details, but the gist is that we have a lot of different servers running, and we had to apply a fix on each one and wait for it to finish before continuing on.

We got things working for half our sites at about 3:20pm PST and for everyone by 4:00pm PST.

We’re very sorry if this affected you. We take downtime extremely seriously, and we’ll do our best to make sure this doesn’t happen again. For the past three years since we launched, we’ve beefed up our system six or seven times, and our goal is always to make sure everything works without a hitch.

If you have any other questions, feel free to give us a call at 805-527-8900. Sorry again!