Content Management News

Big Change Coming

Some un-scheduled, big changes are coming to Clover Content. Actually, that’s the real change, the name. I have been called out for using the word Clover because it has been trademarked and I’m therefore in violation of another company’s trademark rights. Now, I really think its lame to trademark the name of a plant, but, the company that owns the rights to said leafy vegetation has been kind and allowed me some time for transition.

Keeping it Free and Simple

A lot of people have expressed gratitude for making Clover Content free of charge. I'm glad that so many people use and enjoy it. Clover has been around for a year now and I'm seeing new signups daily. Some people have asked how I make money with Clover if I offer it for free. The answer is, I don't.

This service runs on 2 separate servers. One server is dedicated to just serving content to websites and the other is dedicated to this website and the administrative site where you edit your content. This costs me a fair amount of money and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel it in the wallet. But, I am committed to continuing to grow this service and I would like to keep it free of charge.

To support my costs, I have introduced some limited advertising in the administration area of the site at the top bar (never on your site, don't worry). I know it's no fun to have to look at ugly ads so I have kept them to just single text ads that I feel would benefit my users. I have also introduced a new template area where you can purchase HTML templates to improve the look of your site.

A new version of Clover Content is being actively developed as well. This new site will also allow for a white label version of Clover in the months to come. Many people have requested this and I'm working hard to get it done when I can find the time. We may also be re-introducing paid setups for those who are not familiar with HTML in the near future as well.

Again, I am committed to keeping this service free but I do have to support my costs as well and I'm actively seeking ways to do so that won't annoy my users. Thanks for using Clover Content.

SSL Outage

We recently had an SSL certificate outage. The certificate is back in action and everything is working fine once again. To be honest, the reason the certificate expired is because I have been extremely busy with a new born baby and hadn't gotten the time to get things fixed.

So to all of my users, sorry for the inconvenience.

Getting It Done

I want to appologize to my users for the lack of response to contact form inquiries. We had an email problem and I didn't realize it unti today. I also want to mention that I took a bit of a break from Clover but I'm going to be doing many more improvements, including working on the white-label version very soon.

The white-label version of Clover will be available for a fee to designers and developers who want to use Clover for their clients. Because setting sites up has taken up a lot of my time, I will no longer be doing free site setups. Clover will remain free to users who are able to set their own sites up, but if you want to brand it as your own, there will be a fee (still working on the fee structure but it will be simple and reasonable). 

Keep checking back for news about the new white-label version of Clover and thanks for your interest. 

Yeah, It's Free Now

I created Clover because I saw the same problem over and over. People want to manage their site content, but they don't want to make big changes to do it.

Most people end up having to change hosts, change DNS, setup a database, configure software, get a template and the learn a complex system. Clover solves those problems by working where a website already is and only providing the essentials to keep it simple.

My original model was to provide a plugin CMS that's super-easy to setup as well as super-easy to use and charge a nominal monthly fee. After working very hard to promote the product, I have found that people really love the concept of Clover, but the subscription fee is just too much to push them over the edge. There are thousands of CMS's out there that are free and that's hard to compete with.

Because I believe in my product, and what it does, I decided not to pull the plug, rather I chose to adapt. From now on Clover will be free of charge. No more monthly fee. I will still set up sites for free as well. The catch is that in the future their may be some ads in the administration section of Clover (never on your website) to help pay for the hosting costs.

So if you've been on the fence about trying Clover out, now's your chance. I hope you enjoy it and I intend to continue evolving the product and responding to customer feedback.

How BizSpark is Helping Our Business Grow

Clover Content is based on Microsoft technologies. I know, it's not popular to create a startup based on anything other than Ruby on Rails or PHP, but as they say, use what you already know. I happen to be an ASP.Net developer (I am a PHP developer also) and love the .Net platform so it was the natural choice for me to take advantage of my existing skill-set for Clover Content. The core of our system is based on Windows Communication Foundation. That's how we serve up content to our client sites. Clover's administration application is also written using ASP.Net and C#. 

One of the major reasons that burgeoning startups shy away from Microsoft is because of the cost. It's not cheap to obtain a copy of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server and hosting tends to be a bit more expensive. Add the cost of hiring developers who also need copies of that software and you're looking at a big investment. While Microsoft does offer the express line of products, they are a bit limited and not truly suitable for serious development. 

If a startup can get over the cost of development tools, there's still the cost of using Microsoft software in a production environment, which is where things get really pricey (SQL Server licenses are not cheap). One of our biggest challenges was how do we pay for that license while bootstrapping Clover? The answer was timely. Just before we were about to release Clover, Microsoft announced the BizSpark program for startups.

BizSpark helps startups acquire and use (in development as well as production) all the software they need to get off the ground as well as providing support and visibility. Startups get the software free of charge for 3 years at which time they have to pony up a mere $100.00 and then buy actual licenses. The hope is that after 3 years, the startup will have enough cash flow to afford the software.

This program has been a great way for us to obtain the software we need to develop and offer our product. And it's really smart on behalf of Microsoft to help companies like ours get some legs. We also recieve more than software with the program. We get to meet up with other startups locally and get advice from companies who sponsor the program via our local organizer, Dan Willis and the kind folks at Gangplank. Our company's Network Partner is Francine Hardaway at Stealthmode Partners, who was kind enough to sponsor us (BizSpark companies need a Network Partner to get started). 

Clover Content has really benefited from this new program and I highly recommend any startups who are contemplating using the .Net platform look into BizSpark for both the software and the support.

Clover Content Release Update

 For a few weeks we have been working on some changes to Clover's administration interface. Today those changes have been released. One of our goals is to update Clover often and to respond to customer feedback. We have many more features in the works and we are currently figuring out how to add Flickr and Picasa images to your website through Clover. But for now we have made the following changes:

• Finally, we added spellcheck. It's obvious, but it took a little time
• The administration dashboard now shows your recent blog posts, files and contacts
• Better blog permalink functionality (now each post has it's own title, which is good for SEO)
• Some minor user interface enhancements
• Performance improvement for our web services 
   

This is only the beginning of many great new changes to come. We are actively improving our administration interface and adding new features. See our current list of content management features and please leave us feedback and let us know what you'd like to see added or improved. Thanks, the Clover Content simple CMS team.

5 Ways For Small Businesses To Build Community

We are  no longer living in an age where a Yellow Pages ad will bring in new business. Maybe you feel that medium is sufficient, but if you do believe that, you're likely missing out on some big opportunities. For me personally, when I receive a phone book at my front door, I promptly make a contribution to my city recycle program by tossing it into the big blue bin.

The reason I do this is because I expect more from the companies that I'm going to do business with. I don't want to respond to an anonymous ad that someone paid for, I want to see that a small business is in touch with its customer base. I want to see that my landscaper is aware of the specific needs in my area. I want to see that my exterminator knows about the problems facing my neighborhood. I'm not the only one who feels this way. Millions of people use search engines to find a local, small business providers to fit their needs and the first place they end up is your website.

If your website looks like it was last updated in 1999, it will show and immediately turn visitors off. The truth is, most small businesses use their website as a brochure, but brochures are meant for paper. Websites are for dynamic information, for building community. And a website is not the only place to build community. Here are 5 ways your small business can go beyond the brochure or the phone book and start building a useful resource for customers:

1. Start blogging about your small business:
   Blogs aren't just for news, they help create an audience by providing useful information. If you're a chiropractor, a blog is a great place to post weekly pain relief tips. If you're a landscaper, a blog is a good place to remind customers that it's time to start thinking about a seasonal re-seeding of that brown grass. By frequently updating your blog, your users will see that you care about them and about what you do. Posting useful information provides value to customers and when people get value, they come back.
    
2. It's time to create a Twitter account:
   You may or may not have heard of Twitter. It's a micro-blogging platform that allows you to post small statements about what you're doing. Twitter may seem like a useless service to many at first, but it's a really valuable way to build a community by gaining followers. For instance, if your business is running a special, you can tweet that special and your followers will be able to respond to the offer instantly. But Twitter is not just a place for offers and marketing, it's best suited to show that your business is human. Just tweeting about what you're up to can go a long way toward establishing credibility with your audience.
    
3. User voluntary email marketing:
   First off, don't ever spam anyone. But you can obtain a list of your customers using any one of many email marketing systems around (we use Mail Chimp). You obtain this list by allowing your customers to opt-in to the list. When you have a special offer, or you post a valuable article on your blog, you can fire off an email to interested customers letting them know about it.
    
4. Use Facebook fan pages:
   Add a "fan" page to Facebook describing your business, or just add a link to your website from your Facebook account. With 140 million plus users of Facebook, it may help you gain some fans. Let people know about your fan page on your website.
    
5. Give something where it's needed:
   We all need to make a living, but doing something for a group that may not otherwise be able to afford your product or service is a great way to give back to your community. Find a non-profit group that could use what you have and help them out. You don't have go around touting that your business did this great charitable thing either. It doesn't have to be about getting credit for what you've done, it's more about just helping out and that may go much further than any sales or marketing ever will.
    

I hope this list helps your small business out and of course we do have a vested interest in some of these tips (we do have a great, simple CMS). But the key is to have an ongoing conversation with your customers. Hope it helps. If you have any additional tips, feel free to comment.

New Features Update

So we've been hard at work adding in some new features to Clover over past few weeks. One of the things we really wanted to add was enhanced blog functionality. It's not of much use to just have a list of stories. The true value of a blog is in its ability to build a community, to build a following. So we have transformed what was the Clover news list into a full featured blog.

Now it's still not as powerful as say, Wordpress, but hey, we haven't been around quite as long as they have. It is the easiest blog to set up, that we know of. So, you probably know by now that it can be set up using only two lines of code on the page you want it to appear on.

The specific features added to the blog are:

• Permalinks so each story can be linked to
• Configurable pagination so you can decide how many posts show up on a page
• Comments provided by DISQUS so all you need to do is create a DISQUS account and your users can comment on your blog posts
   

We have also made titles for pages optional. Now, if you don't want to use the Clover provided title for your pages, you simple put brackets around the title and it won't appear on your site. This is nice when you want to use the rich text editor for the title as well as the body of your page.

We spent some time updating our client code for both the PHP and ASP.Net libraries as well. Now you can determine what tags surround each part of Clover's output on your pages and you can customize the CSS styles in greater detail. We plan to continue updating the blog functionality and enhancing our product. If you have ideas or suggestions for features, click the feedback tab any time. Thanks.

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