Blog

WordPress 5.0 — aka Gutenberg — will soon be officially released. Gutenberg represents a major change for WordPress and is meant to shift WordPress from being essentially a content management system to being a more robust web development tool. Gutenberg has great potential, but is (at the time of writing this post) very new, and is still being updated almost faster than it can be tested. In our opinion and that of many fellow developers, it is NOT yet stable or usable.  Our team is carefully watching the Gutenberg rollout and how it will impact sites we’ve built or are currently building.

An unfortunate reality these days is that websites are under pretty constant attack from hackers; according to WPBeginner.com, Google blacklists around 70,000 websites each week for different kinds of nefarious online behaviors! Most hackers utilize “brute force attacks” where they try as many different combinations of login credentials as possible to get into a site. Once inside, they might steal valuable client information or mess with your website just because they can. So, what can you do to protect your website and avoid these online pests?

You’ve likely gotten more emails about GDPR lately than you ever thought possible.  It’s a little overwhelming and can be confusing, but don’t stress.  Here’s a quick overview of what it is and what we suggest you do to comply.

We receive many inquiries asking for advice on how to approach updates to existing websites versus creating a new site. Instead of wasting time & money performing seemingly small fixes that end up taking weeks to complete, a rebuild allows your developer to quickly add upgrades without breaking any previous code. Read on if you’re considering adding any changes to your website in the near future.

World Trust is a leading organization in social justice. They work with clients to address systemic racism and unconscious bias, by creating workshops, films, and a robust curriculum that gives people the tools to learn and evolve. Mangrove Web has worked with them to create an online presence for their groundbreaking materials.

We’re passionate about building beautiful, professionally designed websites. This means that we create customized websites, so the backend of your site is specific to your needs. This also means that we don’t use pre-existing WordPress themes, and this comes as a surprise to some. To the non-developer, a generic theme can look like a lifesaver, but for our clients, we maintain that themes are more trouble than they’re worth. For functional websites that look great and are easy to update, custom is the way to go. 

One of our focus areas when building websites for clients is not only how the end user will experience the site, but how our clients will be able to manage the backend and have a tool that serves their ongoing needs. We rely on a few different Content Management Systems (CMSs) to provide this backend infrastructure, and choose the platform according to client needs. But what are all of these systems and why do we choose one over the other? We begin by explaining WordPress.