Thoughts & Updates

Lindsay LaShell, owner of digital marketing company Diamond + Branch, is a trusted partner and valued collaborator. We asked her to share her expert opinion on why content strategy particularly matters to purpose-driven organizations. Here’s what she had to say.

When you get strategic advice for developing your content, your website then becomes a masterful storytelling and conversion tool. Ideally, your website should efficiently guide your visitors to the information they want and convince them to take actions that will engage them more fully with your services or products.

Has it been a few of years since your website got any love? Has your organization grown or changed its mission? Have you done an accessibility report and checked your site speed? Take a look behind the curtain — we’re sharing the questionnaire we use internally when clients ask if it’s time to rebuild their website.

As a group of website designers, developers and content creators, we recognize our responsibility to make our own site, and the sites we create, more accessible for all users. We have also committed to sharing information that will help our peers take steps toward greater accessibility. This post, the third in our 4-part series, aims to do just that.

As a purpose-driven company and B Corp, it’s important that we do everything we can to understand how we as individuals and as a company perpetuate systemic injustice.

If you want to start to make your site more accessible without a ton of heavy lifting, content is a great place to begin. Many of the key considerations can be addressed quickly and easily without back-end support. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

With an estimated 48.9 million people in the US living with a disability, it’s crucial for companies to prioritize website accessibility.

Holiday shopping is even more fun when you know you’re supporting companies that use business as a force for good. We’ve rounded up 10 of our favorite B Corps that sell great products and have solid values. Read on to find gift ideas for everyone on your list.

We became a B Corp on November 9, 2016. In addition to earning our B Corp status, which was certainly cause to celebrate, it was my sister’s birthday (fun!) ….and, also the day Trump was elected (not fun, not fun at all). It was a day of extremely mixed emotions.

Over the years, our team has thought in depth about how we can make the greatest impact with our philanthropic dollars. We at various points considered participating in fantastic 1% for the Planet program, but ultimately decided its focus wasn’t broad enough for us. So, we decided to create our own parameters.

During a recent chat about favorite foods, our team realized how many of our go-to snacks and beverages are produced or distributed by fellow B Corps (with the list of available options growing steadily). Here are ten foodie-friendly companies we love.

Last month, one of our content creators, Kelsey, attended the BLD Mountain West event in Denver, CO. Being new to the B Corp world, the event offered the perfect opportunity for her to network and learn alongside B Corp leaders and business execs who are in the process of becoming certified.

As we wrapped up the month of May at Mangrove, I felt that it wouldn’t be right to pass by our 10 year Mangrove anniversary without taking a moment to celebrate it. My mom might be the only one who reads this entire post, but this exercise in its own right is an important one. It’s always good to make time to celebrate the wins, look ahead, and recommit to where we’re going. Over the last decade, I have been lucky to work with an amazing team, and with many clients that continue to fulfill my original vision of creating websites for good people doing great work. Here’s a peek into the history that made us who we are today.

Here at Mangrove, we can proudly say that we believe in what our clients do, and that’s one of the many reasons we love what we do. Today, we’re taking the opportunity to shine the spotlight on Beneficial State Foundation’s (BSF) Clean Vehicle Assistance Program (CVAP). We partnered with BSF to build a customizable WordPress website that shares information about CVAP and the important work they’re doing to support low-income families in California.

“There are just so many different ways to keep bettering your business,” says Maiya Holliday, founder and CEO of Mangrove Web Development, a Truckee-headquartered but internationally staffed business. “The more businesses that think that way here, the better.”  Read on about Mangrove Web and other local Tahoe-Truckee B Corps in Moonshine Ink.

Search Engine Optimization — making sure that it’s easy for search engines like google to find your site — is a complicated and ever-changing field that often starts with some basic indexing.  Learn about how to index your site in Google and other search engines so you can be found

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.

We’re lucky, here at Mangrove, in that we get to work with some pretty great people. In addition to our team of designers and developers (who are rad), our clients are an amazing bunch. We feel it’s important to take some time to highlight the important work that they are doing, and this month we are shining our spotlight on Elemental Excelerator (EEx). We spoke to their Communications Lead Lauren Tonokawa about the work they are doing to make the world a better place.

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?

When you set out to build your website, one of the initial decisions you’ll have to make is where to host your site. What exactly is a web hosting service? What do they do? What should you look for when choosing your provider? We’re going to answer all those questions right here.

DesignRush is a B2B Marketplace connecting clients with agencies across the globe. Mangrove Web Development is recognized as a top California Web Design Company on DesignRush.

View our profile here.

Five companies in Tahoe and Truckee have taken their social and environmental commitment to a new level by formalizing it as part of their corporate structure. Mangrove Web Development, bigtruck, Environmental Incentives, Eagle Protect PBC and the Law Office of Lara Pearson joined the B Corp movement built on the belief that businesses should be a force for good.

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.

What is the process for building a website?  What happens when you call an agency? How long does it usually take to get a site up and running? How much creative control will you have? Are you expected to know the difference between CSS and HTML? What is WordPress, anyway?

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.

In late 2016, we became a Certified B Corp and shortly after we adopted the Benefit Corporation legal status. That means we are not only third-party certified by the nonprofit B Lab, as a company that has met rigorous environmental and social standards, but we are also legally required to conduct our business in this way.

Maiya and Marie attended their first B Corp Leadership Development, or BLD, at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California. The gathering brought together more than 50 leaders in the Bay Area B Corp community to share best practices and leverage the network of over 200 B Corp Certified companies. With discussion topics in the form of Open Cafes, B Corps discussed building B2B relationships, collaborative marketing efforts, and participants presented environmentally and socially responsible products made by fellow B Corps. Here are some great takeaways from our first BLD.

Helen Lawrence, Bonita Gutierrez, and Gabriela Monico are the trio that make up the Lawrence practice. They offer deportation defense and representation in affirmative immigration processes to the Bay Area’s diverse immigrant population. The practice directly represents families and individuals before immigration courts and agencies, managing over 175 open cases at any given time. Providing low-cost legal services in English, Spanish, and Portuguese is just one aspect of the support the firm extends to immigrants seeking accessible and effective legal representation.

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.

Last month we shared that we applied to become a B Corp. Our certification is now complete and we are thrilled to join the 1,800-plus global companies that use their B Corp status as a way of doing social and environmental good.

Here’s the thing: Working with professional writers to develop your website content is almost always a great idea. We especially recommend this for clients who don’t have a go-to marketing team at the ready, or in cases where existing content could use a refresh. Most development companies are strictly focused on design and dev. The copy that lives on your site is the client’s domain, so the web team can focus on aesthetic and functionality.

The Internet is vast and search results can be intimidating. As a site owner, it’s easy to wonder how people will find your site. Making your website visible to those searching for it can be complex, but learning the basics is well worth your time. To start out, we recommend that you learn the fundamentals of how Google and similar search engines work.

Mangrove Web is in the process of becoming a B Corporation, also known as a certified B Corp. We are feeling pretty pumped about it. Once we’re certified, our B Corp status will help further solidify our commitment that as a for-profit tech company, we can do a lot of good.

Mangrove is made up of people who love to work hard. We also love our ability to work remotely and independently, which affords us the freedom to travel, live in interesting places, and work on the schedules that best support our lives.

Some might see the distances that separate us as a tough challenge to overcome. But our geographically diverse team is actually something we consider a strength.

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.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, has become a buzz term in the last few years. The topic undoubtedly comes up while planning a new website, however we find that there is often a lack of understanding about what SEO really is, what it does, whether it’s necessary, and how to approach it.

When building websites for clients, we focus on how the end user will experience the site, and 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 specifically according to clients needs. But what are all of these systems and why do we choose one over the other? We discussed the benefits of WordPress in a previous post. Here, we explain Squarespace.