Read the latest blog on our projects and new developments in areas like security, WordPress and Typo3. The team at Prater Raines write how projects have progressed with challenges that have been faced. We like to keep you informed in technology and security updates.
Prater Raines has been supporting Liberal Democrat MPs since 2003, when we first developed the website of Andrew Stunell. We continue to do so today, delivering websites for Tim Farron MP and Greg Mulholland MP.
Through our system of daily, weekly and monthly email digests, we offer an unparalleled ability to match ground campaigning through Focus leaflets with online campaigning via email. You produce the content, and we’ll handle the delivery. The perfect system for hardworking local MPs.
In these days of big data, we also offer open, click and donation tracking as standard, as well as the ability to import data from other sources.
The Parliamentary Press Gallery was founded in 1803 and now represents more than 300 newspaper, agency, radio and TV journalists who work at Westminster. Since 2014 it has offered internships, in partnership with the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, to talented and committed young people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds interested in gaining work experience within the Parliamentary Press Gallery at the House of Commons.
This project required a redesign and refresh of the Parliamentary Press Gallery website. The hosting of the site was moved to our secure servers, with the new site built on WordPress, with a theme modified in house, and with the addition of historically relevant imagery to complement the design.
We were delighted to be asked to create a website presence for three candidates in the Liberal Democrat Presidential Election 2014. Each website needed to make use of base Foci2 skins in a unique way, incorporating strong imagery, engaging content, and CSS overrides, to create a brand identity for the candidate that distinguished them from their competitors who were also using the same web services.
Each campaign sought to engage with members in unique ways, leveraging our social media integration, contact/volunteer forms, and email digests to keep supporters engaged and updated throughout the campaign.
The Liberal Democrat President, Sal Brinton continues to use her site to help keep members up to date with her work as President.
The War of the Words pop-up HG Wells exhibition is based just a few doors away from us on Sandgate High Street. We were pleased to support the project by putting together their simple but effective web presence to promote the products on sale, reason behind the exhibition and more. Featuring a fully responsive design, the site is easy to use for those searching for details on their phone while visiting the area!
The Sandgate Business Forum website offers free listings to all local businesses and also co-ordinates a free business email list to update businesses on forthcoming local events and news. Prater Raines put together the site, including the design and branding, which has then been reflected elsewhere in the Sandgate Community – from street flags to the Sandgate Parish Council website.
Updated 14/11/2016 – site moved to WordPress and new tools added.
20’s Plenty for Sandgate is the website for Sandgate Parish Council’s 20’s Plenty campaign. The aim of the campaign is to change the speed limit in residential streets to 20MPH.
The site incorporates various WordPress plugins to allow users to support the campaign, sign up to volunteer as part of the campaign, and also to receive newsletters about the progress of the campaign and other 20’s Plenty news.
Over the last year, Prater Raines have completely rebuilt the CIPR Conversation, a site built on WordPress and featuring content aggregated and commissioned from a wide range of Public Relations contributors, and curated by the CIPR themselves.
Since deployment we’ve further continued to work with the CIPR to continue to develop the Conversation, enhancing the design and adding many new interactive and multimedia components from video to podcasts to opinion polls – all wrapped in a responsive design that should look good on any device.
Kent Recovery had a pre-existing website through an on-line site building service, but it had display problems on some browsers and was poorly listed in search engines.
Prater Raines redesigned the site to make the service offer clearer, work well on all browsers using a responsive design, and to be easier to find in search engines. We also worked to source new images throughout, remake logos and rewrite and optimise the text content throughout the site.
The client is pleased with the new look of the site, and within a few days the site was performing considerably better in search engines.
Users of 1.0.1 and 1.0.2-beta releases of OpenSSL (including 1.0.1f and 1.0.2-beta1) may need to run a quick upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.1g thanks to a bug which it seems may affect upwards of 500,000 servers on the net. The Heart Bleed bug allows hackers to access up to 64k of memory on a server, meaning they could grab usernames and passwords, without any way of identifying or logging that there has been a hack.
The Prater Raines servers aren’t affected by this issue, but for those that are this is a massive security hole. A short term fix, where upgrading isn’t an option, is to recompile OpenSSL with -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS. We were made aware of the issue by fellow coders based in Scotland. The bug hasn’t really made the headlines at the time of writing, but it is potentially massive.
Luckily there is already a site that you can use to check whether your server is at risk at http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/. Needless to say, we got the “All good” message for our website servers. You can also find out more about the bug on the BBC News website as well as on the OpenSSL website. Users of Minecraft will be relieved to know that Amazon have upgraded their servers with the fix, although changing all of your passwords may be a good call.
Fittingly with Valentine’s Day tomorrow, we LOVE our latest website – launched today!
The Ad Trailers Kent website is an example of responsive design and makes use of CSS media queries to adapt to the needs of the end user. It was produced for a local startup to complement their offline marketing materials.
The site is built around a simple colour scheme, with minimal graphics, and contains a few static pages to showcase what Ad Trailers Kent has to offer. To give a sense of motion to the site we’ve added vertical animation to the navigation between pages.
The responsive aspects of the design are constructed to take into account the most common tablet and mobile phone screen resolutions. The menu location is able to switch on a mobile phone in order to suit the needs of a much smaller screen, thus preserving the motion within the site to keep the design feeling interesting.