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I can happen to the best of us folks. You send an email to a valid Gmail account, and it may even be someone you’ve emailed with before. SUDDENLY, you get a nasty email back to you saying your email was blocked!! Google (who owns GMAIL) has been cranking down on the security requirements to help reduce spam to Gmail users.  This includes requireing that the domain sending the email, has to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC records set!  These help Google validate that the emails coming in are actually from the domain they claim to be! If you don’t have these things in place, there’s a good chance your domain will NOT be able to send emails to Gmail users unti it’s fixed.  Thankfully, that’s easy enough to do.  Whether your email is hosted with us at Lions Mane, or hosted anywhere else, you’ll probably need to be sure […]

Man oh man, this is the question of the ages! For folks who have a website they’re happy with, they should definitely keep things current, code and plugins updated for security reasons, and have new blog post or other curated content to keep SEO/Google happy.  It turns out we can help with that – and if you want to know more, you can visit here. However, if you know your website hasn’t been touched or updated in a couple of years (or longer!), then yeah it’s time to have this conversation. There’s a good chance marketing needs and website expectations by users have changed since your website was built. Something newer and more professional (in the eyes of the users) may be needed. Especially if your industry has changed in how it’s portrayed on the web, or what web functionality is included. If you think you might need something totally […]

Hey folks, you may have heard that WordPress was about to push out version 6 of it’s platform. If you have a website built on WordPress, this might make you a little nervous since updates that move up to the next number are usually pretty big. Big updates can mean broken websites for a lot of people! In this case, version 6 isn’t a major update in the usual way. Instead of BIG changes, version 6 is comprised of many small changes. A lot of these are really good, and inherent to site management.  If you maintain your own WordPress site, this could make some steps a lot easier. If you’re confused by the changes, there are helpful YouTube videos out there to show you what is going on. If you’re not sure this would be good for your site or not, just keep your eye on it in the […]

It’s pretty much a given that since Google made it a priority that EVERY website out there be secured, having an SSL certificate on your website has become a requirement. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling something online, using a contact form to gather contact information or even just using your website to share information. Google will give more preference in it’s Search Engine Optimization if that website is secured behind an SSL certificate on the hosting server. “How do I know if I have one?” – you may ask. The answer is simple. If you see a padlock at the top of your browser (next to the URL bar) when on your website, then your site is secured! Some browsers may give an error or a warning if it goes to a site that isn’t properly secured behind a current certificate. No certificate, no padlock!  You are certainly more […]