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:
- Select ‘Add Page’ from the menu
- Type the page name
- Select the page type
- Select a layout
- Select create page button
- Drag page to where you want it to appear in the sites navigation
- Save your changes
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
