Mugo Web's blog

CAPTCHA is an essential need on online forms, but to be blunt, the UX sucks. Without the implementation tips (helpfully detailed below), Google’s otherwise reliable reCAPTCHA service implemented “as-is” doesn’t actually provide any browser validation. The user will have to wait for it to make a time-consuming round trip to the server. It’s a problem for anyone and becomes compounded for users with accessibility needs.

Links are among a website's most valuable components. They connect (that’s what the word “link” means, after all) different pages and resources, helping site visitors find the content they are looking for. Well-planned and formatted links are like a detailed, intuitive treasure map that sends visitors to the right destination.

Links are also critical for making your website accessible to visitors with visual or other impairments. A link that lacks important information can prevent some visitors from accessing all the treasures a website holds. Or even worse, it can send users to completely undesirable content and discourage them from exploring all your site has to offer.

In this post, I’ll discuss how to present links in various contexts, clearly explaining how they can create and inform powerful relationships between different pages and assets.

If you were used to the Open Source version of eZ Publish, you are probably familiar with the eZ Flow extension, which allows editors to build pages visually specifying the components based on a Layout, Zones, and Blocks system. Users that have migrated to the Ibexa OSS might have noticed that there is no such system available, only the Ibexa Page Builder, which is restricted to the Enterprise version.

At Mugo, we love to contribute to the Open Source community. After identifying this need, we decided to create a prototype for an alternative to the eZ Flow extensions for Ibexa OSS. With that in mind, we created the Mugo Page Bundle as a simple way to build page layouts.

In this blog post I am going to talk about several security best practices, particularly for configuring AWS Access Keys. Some of these practices are based on a project that we inherited which was compromised by hackers. Best practices are often learned from mistakes; and when the mistakes are someone else's, so much the better!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 has the reputation of being a pricey option for cloud-based hosting and compute resources. Certainly, that was our initial impression here at Mugo Web years ago when we began standardizing our hosting and site management business on a single cloud platform.

However, we quickly discovered that AWS is actually quite affordable. In fact, our monthly costs for a virtual machine using 8GB of RAM, at 100% usage, is predictably lower with AWS than with other virtualized or traditional data centers. That’s without aggressively tuning our resource usage, which is often the focus of how to optimize AWS pricing.

In this post, I’ll show you how AWS can be a cost-effective option for professionally managed websites. I’ll also take a quick look at some of the additional savings tactics you can employ to get more value from your decision to run on AWS.

Managing bot access to your website is one of the least sexy tasks a site manager handles. You just identify the bot’s user agent, edit robots.txt to allow or disallow access, and you’re done. Right?

Of course, nothing’s ever quite that simple when it comes to safeguarding your web identity. Sure, robots.txt is still the industry stalwart – it’s a tactic we often use for our clients here at Mugo Web when we want to block a specific bot for some practical reason.

With Gmail and Yahoo now requiring bulk emailers to implement authentication protocols, making sure you understand the differences between SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and how they work together is essential for your email marketing efforts. We'll walk you through how to set these up in your email provider of choice. 

While YouTube embed options are powerful and effective, they are not always the most efficient use of resources when it comes to bandwidth. Using a facade can help decrease page load time and increase site performance without sacrificing any of the utility of the native YouTube embed options. 

Typing the same instructions into multiple terminals at the same time is a great trick when you have a group of servers that have the same or similar configurations. 

Generative AI is shaking up every category of knowledge work, and professional software development is on the front lines of the revolution. With new advancements on the horizon, what does that mean for developers in the here and now? Our team experimented with a few of the leading tools and shared their impressions, along with suggestions on best practices for navigating AI usage in web development.

WordPress has a flexible and robust ecosystem for creating a wide variety of websites. But when your site needs to grow and expand functionality, having a dedicated, experienced development team to support and build out new features is essential. Learn about Mugo Web’s best practices when it comes to developing in a WordPress environment and see how we’ve helped save clients thousands of dollars with innovative solutions.

Getting the most out of your WordPress site can take some work. You want a site that looks great, loads quickly, and provides a good user experience for visitors. Unfortunately, WordPress sites often struggle with optimizing images, which can cause significant delays in load time and produce sub-optimal experiences for users on mobile devices. With a little effort, you can create responsive images and drastically improve your site’s performance, both for users and search engines.

There's a lot your website needs to communicate to users. When you have crucial information you don't want people to miss, an announcement banner can be a useful way to prioritize that information on your site. While this can be a simple solution, there are several use cases to consider when implementing site-wide banners. Working with our library partners, we've developed a full range of features to help deliver information quickly, effectively, and painlessly for both the front-end user and the back-end administrator.

Monitoring your web infrastructure is key for several reasons. It enables you to gain insights into the performance and health of your resources, identify potential issues, and make informed decisions for optimization. AWS offers a comprehensive monitoring solution through Amazon CloudWatch, which provides built-in metrics and the flexibility to create custom metrics. However, while comprehensive, the free monitoring options available still might not always meet your needs, and upgrading to the next level of configuration might be overkill and drive up your hosting costs. Auditing and customizing your CloudWatch infrastructure is a great way to get the metrics you desire and save money along the way.

As your website grows, custom site search becomes an increasingly important way for users to quickly find the information they need.

Here at Mugo Web, we find that most of our clients’ sites evolve to the point that they want to add a custom search feature. They may simply want to provide a more seamless experience for users as they search for that one how-to blog post from seven years ago, or they may want to guide an intricate search and drill down through a scientific taxonomy.

Your website can have the best data in the world, but it quickly loses value if your users struggle to find it. Solid search features and intuitive filtering options can increase discoverability and lead to more sales. 

We’ve helped several of our partners by creating better solutions for searching to address this issue. Our book publisher clients using the ReaderBound platform have very rich data sets they need to make use of for discoverability, presentation, and sales.

One of the most helpful uses of website analytics for an ecommerce site is being able to track a user’s journey. Following someone’s path as they enter the site, visit different pages, and reach (or don’t reach) key milestones can tell you a lot about what is working on your site and what isn’t.

Subscription paywalls are an essential part of any publisher’s strategy to build a strong brand and diversified revenue stream. Our team at Mugo Web has worked with several publishers to implement paywalls based on content type, age, and subscription level. Imagine any criteria you can, and we’ve built a paywall to give site visitors gated access to premium content.

Sometimes, Apache Solr doesn’t index data in just the way you need for your custom search criteria. When you need to add data not indexed by default in the Solr search engine, the document field mapper should be created to fit your needs.

Having quality images on your site is important, and creating all the different versions of images for the various ways they will be used on your site is time-consuming and potentially frustrating. Letting browsers auto-render images to different sizes and shapes will cause pixelation and stretched images that don’t reflect well on your brand. The good news is that there are several tactics to automatically generate high-quality and specific versions of images to cover all the use cases.

Google Maps is an almost ubiquitous tool and can be incredibly useful to integrate into your site. There’s a lot of versatility in its uses, but depending on how much you’re asking it to do, the results might not be optimal. When you have a huge dataset to display on Google Maps, the performance tends to slow down. When that data is spread across a large geographic area, the issue can be compounded. As you zoom out and more markers try to load, your map can slow to a crawl. What was a useful tool now becomes a point of frustration for visitors to your site. Let’s take a look at the technique that can be used to improve the performance of maps with large datasets.

One of the major selling points for Google Analytics 4, when it was released in late 2020, was the inclusion of predictive analytics metrics, a Big Data feature that until then had largely been the domain of enterprise analytics packages.

Now that Google has announced that GA4 will replace Universal Analytics for all users by July 1, 2023, it’s worth a second look at how GA4’s predictive analytics can impact your business.

The Mugo Web team recently worked with one of our long-time clients, FindaTopDoc.com, to execute a seamless migration from its existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to a new platform.

This project was critical since FindaTopDoc relies on extensive use of CRM integrations to power its physician directory website. Applications range from updating doctors’ searchable listings to managing user-generated content, a pillar of the FindaTopDoc publishing strategy.

Events are the buzziest change between Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4). There’s a good reason for that — they mark a very substantial shift in how property owners track data on their sites. This is a daunting prospect and an opportunity. As a property owner, you will need to reevaluate how you use your analytics and how you can make the new system work for you. As you make the switch to GA4 before UA’s End Of Service date (July 1, 2023), you might be focusing on just recreating a familiar pattern and making your GA4 property look the same as your old UA dashboard; the better option is to clarify exactly what you need from your site’s analytics and leverage GA4’s superior flexibility to accomplish your goals.