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.
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.
Prater Raines started working with the Radical Middle Way on incremental improvements to their existing website in October 2011 and were very excited to be selected to completely overhaul the site in conjunction with web design agency Make Me Believe.
We worked closely with both the client and the designer to create a website which is simple to use and update but also dynamic, attractive, and responsive.
The new build takes advantage of the company’s large existing resource of graphical, video, and audio material to create an engaging site that feels rich with content yet with a structure that is easy to understand and browse around.
When the CIPR needed to transfer from their existing developers, Prater Raines worked with them to minimise the disruption of transfer of their web hosting and providers.
The CIPR have a number of different sites, all of which needed transferring to new hosting hardware, including the configuration of new virtual machines. By liaising carefully with the previous developers, managing the domain name transfer process, running our own DNS servers, and specifying, buying and installing new servers, the three public facing websites were publicly available throughout the transfer with no downtime, and editing and updating of the sites was restricted for just a few minutes.
With their sites transfered, we offer help-desk support to their team through an online ticketing system (as well as through phone support and meeting up on-site: we believe in “real person” support!).
Our support includes hosting support, domain management, dealing with any technical issues, dealing directly with third-party providers on the CIPR’s behalf and bugfixing for a straightforward annual support fee.
We are also working with the CIPR on enhancements and developments to their site, offering cost-effective web development.
Our online business management software was designed specifically for Seymour after discussion with management and time spent on the shop floor investigating the functionality the staff actually required. It saved time and resources inputting and managing orders across multiple physical locations without deployment issues. Custom reports, invoices, and delivery sheets were paired with an intelligent dashboard providing rapid access to frequent tasks and alerting managers to vehicle service and job input requirements.
Our cost-effective brochureware website development also means we have been able to provide websites for Seymour’s core business, van hire, international freight, and fleet management arms. Good code implementation has enabled us to refresh the web site designs at minimal cost over the years. The websites have successfully generated more business leads and return excellent results in search engines for the client’s desired queries with no online advertising spend.
The Gurkha Justice Campaign was one of the most successful lobbying campaigns of the last 10 years, delivering justice for Gurkhas who had fought for the British Army but were denied citizenship of this country.
Prater Raines Ltd supported the online campaign with expert advice, domain registration, website set-up and design, site and email copy-writing, email dispatch, and campaign management.