This comparison was written to compare these two services. I did not look at the many solutions marketed at churches which is why I changed the title of the post from ‘the best’ alternative to ‘a great’ alternative. I have since seen several very nice CMS options targeted at churches which I hope to review thoroughly in the near future. 

About Clover

Clover is a flash based content management system designed for dummies. Their target demographic is primarily churches and ministries, although they are now targeting businesses. It doesn’t get much easier than Clover but that comes at a price both from a technical and financial standpoint. Flash, like many things in life is not inherently bad, but how it’s implemented can be. To say Clover’s claim that you “Get a $20,000 website for 1/20th the price.” is hyperbole is an understatement.

About Virb

I began using Virb back in 2006 when it was a social networking site populated mostly by photographers, musicians, and those like myself who simply loved the beautiful interface. It never really took off the way many had speculated and then in a bold move they relaunched their site with a new vision and a new direction. Their new goal is to provide an “elegantly simple way to build a website”.

The Interface

Clover & Virb both had the same goal of providing an interface so simple that anyone could build a site. They both succeeded in this, but Clover’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. Their system is so simple that it provides almost no flexibility to do the most simple things like embedding pictures in a page. Virb was able to build an application as simple as Clover but far more accessible, flexible and powerful.

Accessibility Issues With Flash

Clover seems to have some accessibility issues both for search engines and humans but the latter is the most serious. Although clover has done a decent job of making it accessible to search engines, it’s far perfect. The more serious issue, however, is accessibility to humans with disabilities. They do not give the option to view a non-flash based site unless you are using a mobile device or you have Javascript disabled. You cannot navigate the flash-based site with the keyboard such as using the tab key. It is not possible to scroll their content boxes without using the scroll bar. There are issues with linking to specific pages.

Adding a page

It takes 7-9 steps in Clover to create a page and begin adding content:

  1. Select ‘Add Page’ from the menu
  2. Type the page name
  3. Select the page type
  4. Select a layout
  5. Select create page button
  6. Drag page to where you want it to appear in the sites navigation
  7. Save your changes
  8. Navigate to the page you just created so you can edit it. This can take up to two steps if it’s a sub-menu.

The screenshot below shows steps 2-5 but this process highlights one of the weakness of flash when it’s not properly implemented. After typing the page name you can’t just hit the Tab-key to move to the next option and instead you are required to use the mouse to actually select the next option.

Create a page with Clover Sites

Although these steps are easy and anyone can figure it out, Virb makes it even faster and much easier. It’s a 2 step process in Virb and you’re already adding content to your page. When you’re done, simply save the page and drag it where you want it to appear within the navigation.

With Virb you begin by selecting the blue Create a new Page button you see in the upper right of this screenshot. Immediately a menu is displayed that asks you to select the type of page you want to create.

Create a page with Virb

There are five page types in Virb to help you easily add content such as audio, video, pictures, etc., but the custom page is one that will be used often as it’s just standard blank page. After selecting the page type, it automatically takes you to the page to begin editing. In the picture below you can see they use an editor that allows you to add style to your page such as making text bold, creating lists, changing font-size, add section headings, and last but certainly not least you can add picture right into the page like I’ve also done in this post.

Edit Virb Page

But another very powerful feature is the edit button just below the title text-box. I enlarged it so you can see it better, but it lets you choose a custom URL for the page. For example, if this is your ‘About Us’ page you can name it to ‘about’ which would let you access the page by typing in http://yoursite.com/about This is powerful when it comes to making your site accessible to visitors and search engines. This is also a great feature for churches who want to have custom URL for promotional use. Let’s say your church is having a special event called Promise Keepers, you could create a page with the event info and give it a custom URL on promotional material like http://yoursite.com/promise/ which is easy for people remember and type and thus increasing the chance that they will find the information they need. 

Adding Media

It is difficult to even know where to start in comparing Virb to Clover in this area because they are so vastly different. Clover is very limited in how you can add media to their sites. You can’t just add pictures to a page like you see in this post. Instead the templates have predefine image placeholders in which you can change the picture.

The video player in their demo is outdated and does not embed directly into the page, instead it has to be launched into a separate pop-up window; The same is true of audio. It is of course Flash based also.

With Virb it’s as easy as selecting the picture, video or audio you want to upload and you’re done. You can create photo galleries, video galleries, and even audio albums with virtually no work involved. Audio is uploaded and stored under albums so to use this for sermons you simply create a single album or multiple albums if you tend to have a series of messages. This is actually a very cool thing for churches because you simply create a new Album, upload an image for the album art (message series) and then the audio and you have a very nice way to organize your messages. If you look at the picture below you simply have to click the blue box that says, “Photo or Video” and it instantly brings up a box where you can navigate to the picture you want to add to the gallery. After selecting the open button it will automatically begin uploading the image/video.

Add Virb Photo

Media Storage

This again is an area where Virb completely goes beyond Clover’s 100GB storage limit. Virb offers unlimited storage of all your audio, pictures, and video. They also have support for High-Def video and at this time it’s limited to 512MB in size.

Performance

I recently came across several churches and non-profit’s using Clover and initially when I viewed the page I thought something was wrong and left. It seemed strange that the page appeared to load but nothing was displayed, so I went back to the site and waited and eventually flash-site loaded and I saw the Clover logo. Most people probably wouldn’t go back and the only reason I did is because knew enough to recognize that something wasn’t right and wanted to see what it was. I did some tests on 5 different Clover sites and each one took 8-12 seconds on my 10Mbps download, 1.5Mbps upload connect before the first hint of anything appeared. This is where Clover again fails significantly in making sites accessible by not providing some option to view wait for the site to load or view an HTML version.

The Shocking Cost

These limitations with Clover’s cost is what prompted me to write the comparison. Clover charges an initial $1,000 + $20/month and if you want to change templates/designs, it’s another $200. They make outrageous claims like “Get a $20,000 website for 1/20th the price.” and in their F.A.Q they have this question, “Why’s Clover so inexpensive? Is there a catch?” and their answer is:

“It’s funny that whenever something is priced so inexpensively we expect that it’s too good to be true. We have specifically priced Clover for budget-minded people. This means that although we might have been able to price each site a bit higher, we decided to keep the price low enough for real people to afford it. We like to think of it as a luxury car for the price of a coupe.”

The real truth is you are paying the price of a luxury car and getting a coupe instead. If you were to pay a design studio to create a site like Clover’s, it would probably cost between $2k-$6k if everything was unique. A non-unique site like Clovers would probably cost between $500-$3k on the high-end. Even if you use this comparison, Clover seems to be a great price, but you must take into consideration that usually you own the created site, but with Clover you are only paying for a subscription. This means you can’t just walk away with your site and go to another company for cheaper hosting/service. Everything about the website seems to take advantage of those people who don’t know anything about websites but know they need one. My personal opinion is that a fair price would be closer to $50-$100 for the initial cost and then $20/month.

Now, Virb is new to the scene so it wasn’t an option until now (August, 2010), but that has changed and Virb only costs $10/month with no hidden fees or upfront costs. I read Clover’s complete list of features and there wasn’t a single thing on their list that Virb doesn’t do equally as well (In most cases Virb does it far better). The only downside currently to Virb is they don’t have a huge amount of templates available and the majority of their current templates are targeted at photographers, artists, and musicians. Although this may seem limiting, their templates are HTML and you are given almost complete control over CSS. Virb plans to open up their template gallery to submissions so it can grow and expand. It’s free and easy to switch templates so as their template gallery expands, you can change your design as often as you want.

EDIT: To be fair, one area that Clover does do better currently is providing a mobile version of each website. Virb has stated they are working on making their sites more accessible to mobile devices, it doesn’t have a solution yet. This doesn’t mean your sites are inaccessible, it functions just like any other website on the web, it just means they don’t have it specifically styled for mobile devices. This is hardly a serious issue on the iPad or netbooks, only on small devices because you have to zoom in on the page to navigate and read.

Categories: Virb, Clover,

In recent weeks a large number of Media Temple customer have had their Wordpress sites hacked. A simple Twitter search will reveal a majority of the dozens of hacked Wordpress sites were Media Temple customers. There was even a thread on the official Wordpress Forums for Media Temple customers. Many of these users reported they were using the latest version of Wordpress 3.01. At first glance it would appear that it was only affecting Media Temple customers and therefore many wrongly assumed that it must be a security vulnerability with Media Temple’s infrastructure. Irresponsible and uninformed bloggers accused Media Temple of being lax on security and shifting blame. 

The Facts

Although I mentioned a simple Twitter search would reveal that the majority hacked Wordpress sites were Media Temple customers, the fact is they weren’t the only ones. This was either purposefully overlooked by many or more than likely it was a irresponsible rush to judgment and laziness.  

Several of Media Temple’s customers reported on the Media Temple forums that they were running WordPress 2.9.2 (even 2.3) while others said they were using the latest version. Well guess what? The latest Wordpress 3.01 is about two week old and it’s being reported by Major Security that it is vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting attacks. So all those people who used the latest version and blamed (mt) should be angry at WordPress.

The fact is Media Temple was not to blame for these attacks and they should be praised for their amazing support. With the exception of one (1) security problem they had with FTP passwords a few months back, Media Temple has had the best security and been the most open, honest and proactive hosting company I know of. They wrote a very informative post on their blog describing how these attacks occur, what can be done to prevent them and how to clean them. They also put together some excellent information on security and how to clean an infected Wordpress site on their Wiki. You can also view their Twitter stream and see all the support they were providing to customers in helping them recover from these attacks.

The sad reality though is most of the irresponsible bloggers won’t acknowledge their incorrect, irresponsible and misguided comments. They won’t apologize and they certainly won’t commend Media Temple for their commitment to security and their customers. Yes, I’ve become a loyal customer (and fan) of Media Temple but that’s because no other company I know of provides the same level of service or has the same commitment to it’s customers.

Categories: hosting, security,

This article is a must read…

"Nearly all the government paper issues ever made have shared the same fate as those whose history we have sketched. The phases through which they all pass is remarkably similar. The issue of paper money is generally resorted to by governments, as a resource to meet indispensable expenditures. This is contrary to the first principle of money, which is, that being an instrument made by the government at the expense and for the convenience of the individuals who use it, it should only be manufactured when demanded by the individuals. The principle which controls the issue of government paper money being false, like all other recourse to false principles, the issue cannot fail to be injurious to both government and people. No matter how despotic or popular the government issuing the paper money may be, the public soon lose confidence in it: if forced by legal enactments to accept it, they avoid holding it, and hoard the coin, in which they have confidence, and which, therefore, suddenly disappear from cirulation. The anxiety to exchange paper money, in which the community has no confidence, for commodities and other property which have an intrinsic value, soon produces a rapid rise of prices, which is the true indication and measure of the depreciation of all paper money having a forced circulation. Every rise in the prices, being in reality a fall in the value of the paper money, instead of inducing holders of commodities and property to realize, only increases their desire to retain their desire to retain them, whilst it increases the desire of the holders of paper money to exchange it for anything possessing intrinsic value. The inevitable result is a panic in regard to the paper money, and the very government that issued it is soon forced to refuse it in payment of taxes and loans, as it will no longer procure the supplies needed by the government and by its officers and employees."
Money By Charles Moran (1863)
"Such are the terrible perturbations produced in communities by a forced cirulation of paper money. An inevitable fatality urges the Governments that use it, toward its abuse; for a forced circulation of paper money is always resorted to in moments of crisis, when the ordinary resources are insufficient. A first excess in the issue of paper money, rendered necessary by excessive expenditures, produces a depreciation in the value of the money received in payment of the taxes levied, and this depreciation obliges the Government to make further issues to augment its resources, so as to compensate the depreciation in the value of the taxes; and so on, ad infinitum, until the value of the paper falls to zero, which is equivalent to general or rather national bankruptcy."
Gustave Puynode (1866)
Categories: money,

I just finished a week at a Youth for Christ camp at Island Lake. This was my third year and I can’t wait to do it all over again next year. It is hard to find the word to express the brokenness and pain in the lives of so many kids who come to these camps. It is even more difficult to express the love and compassion felt by everyone else from the camp director to the counselors. These camps are very special and God is faithful to work through them to change the lives of so many hurting teens. For me it’s the highlight of my summers in spite of the physical exhaustion I feel by the end of the week. There is nothing more exciting in this world than seeing a young teen whose life is so messed up being transformed by Jesus. Friday as I stood on the shore of the lake a young man named Isaac swam up to me and the following dialog took place:

Isaac: You’re Zach right?
Me: Yes
Isaac: I thought so…guess what?
Me: What?
Isaac: I accepted Jesus into my life.
Me: Really? That’s awesome! It will be the best decision you ever made!
Isaac: I know, everything already feels better. I’m gonna go now…I just wanted to tell you.

I can’t share more details but it’s not uncommon to hear stories of teens who are being physically and sexually abused at home. It’s not uncommon to hear stories of kids who either tried to commit suicide or was considering it. Not everyone is surrenders their life to Christ but everyone comes away changed. I know I certainly do!

Categories: yfc, camp, ministry,
"Indeed, what could be more ludicrous in a vast and glorious universe like this than a human being, on the speck called earth, standing in front of a mirror trying to find significance in his own self-image? It is a great sadness that this is the gospel of the modern world."
Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ by John Piper
Categories: Quote,, Books,

Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in my personal blogging life. I am taking the journey from a self-hosted blog to a third-party application hosted elsewhere. There are several reason but primarily it comes down to features, ease-of-use, and performance. Wordpress has become a powerful application and framework for blogging but that often leads to it’s own problems usually related to performance. I chose Tumblr simply because it’s simple and sexy interface and ease-of-use. Although, it does have some really cool features which make it easy to share different types of media such as Youtube videos.

Categories: Wordpress, Tumblr,