We’re delighted to have brought live a new web site for APDS – The Association of Palliative Day Services – who are the national representative body formed exclusively for palliative day service professionals in the UK.
The site is, as you would expect from a site designed by Prater Raines, a fully secure https site throughout, and designed to work well on screens from desktop to mobile. We worked with APDS designing them everything from a new logo upwards, and assisting in getting the content in place.
The site is built on Drupal 8 but some of the key areas are the ones you can’t see.
We’ve hosted and updated a bespoke website for the Sandgate Business Forum for some time, but recently took the opportunity to modernise it and move it to WordPress to make updating it rather easier.
Although the site has retained its distinctive colour scheme and “look and feel” it is now much easier to use on mobiles and tablets, and includes a filterable Google Map view of businesses in the area to make finding any business easy.
There have been a host of other enhancements including a Google Calendar events widget to the right hand side, and of course designing to ensure it works well on mobile, tablet and desktop.
The Sandgate Business Forum is a genuinely free business directory for any business based in the Sandgate, Kent area.
Traditionally associated with e-commerce websites, HTTPS is beginning to be more widely used on all types of websites to secure user accounts and keep communications private. Traffic to and from your website will be encrypted to guarantee that users are communicating with the website they intended and ensure that contents cannot be read or forged by third parties.
The security of your site users and data is clearly paramount, but there are other reasons why moving to HTTPS is important. Google announced in 2014 that they would give a small SEO advantage to sites using HTTPS over HTTP and are taking steps to further alert users when sites are insecure. They won’t be the only ones.
All good things must come to an end.
Today, we’re retired our “Youtube” embed component from our Liberal Democrat Foci system, which allowed you to embed video (with a bit of difficulty, we will admit) into that website. Sad times.
Happily, “coincidentally” also today, we’ve launched a new component that will allow you to embed any OEmbed content in your site. That content includes videos from YouTube, but also content from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Meetup, Reddit, Slideshare, Soundcloud, Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, Vine, WordPress, Daily Motion… That list goes on and on, and we think its a BIG step forward!
As the release from WordPress yesterday says:
“WordPress 4.6.1 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
“WordPress versions 4.6 and earlier are affected by two security issues: a cross-site scripting vulnerability via image filename, reported by SumOfPwn researcher Cengiz Han Sahin; and a path traversal vulnerability in the upgrade package uploader, reported by Dominik Schilling from the WordPress security team.
We do a lot of work with the Charted Institute of Public Relations, including supporting their main corporate Drupal based site, the “Influence” site of curated aggregated content from their members based on WordPress and CIPR Ladder (member login required to view) which is their bespoke CPD (Continuous Professional Development) platform.
This year CIPR have again run their annual “Summer of CPD” to encourage professional development. To support their work on this, CIPR needed some new detailed reports from their CPD system to support their weekly, regionally based updates on the CPD achievements of their members.
Since the launch of PHP7 in December 2015, we’ve been quietly working at upgrading our servers (and all our sites) from PHP5.6 (and at the same time upgrading to MySQL 5.7). We’re pleased to say it’s now complete and all (*) our sites, including our WordPress installations, are running on PHP7.
Although the upgrade process itself had been reasonably simple, it has taken a while to deal with incompatibilities and issues thrown up by the upgrade. There are a number of reasons for the move, but the biggest one is the speed improvement PHP7 delivers: it varies from site to site but PHP7 is estimated to be 100% quicker than PHP5.6!
In July we launched a new site with a bespoke design for Stephen Lloyd, Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Spokesman (and former MP) for Eastbourne.
The new site was a key part of Stephen’s recently announced bid for re-election at the next General Election.
The site is based on and has the same functionality of our Liberal Democrat service, but the look and feel was intentionally very different to our other sites and based on ideas from Stephen’s team. It’s also designed to be totally mobile friendly and drive sign-ups to build Stephen’s team – and it’s working.
A fresh look for the website of one of our longstanding clients: Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale and Leader of the Liberal Democrats.
The design has been tested to be responsive and look good on a wide range of devices and screen sizes, and is one of over 30 available to the users of our Lib Dem Foci2 service.
Lib Dem clients can find out more on our Foci2 Facebook support group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/Foci2/
Kiron Reid is a Liberal activist, writer and campaigner in support of civil liberties, the environment and an inclusive, tolerant society. He is a committed internationalist and pro-European. He has written extensively about Liberalism, most often in the British Liberal magazine “Liberator”.
We developed a WordPress site for Kiron with a clean design, splitting content into his focus areas of politics, law and election observation. Like all our WordPress installations we keep it up to date with the latest updates and offer a host of other support – like making his site a https secured site, full daily back-ups, domain name renewal – as standard.