Blog

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.

Tim Prater

We’re delighted that our very own Tim Prater has been selected to join the Nominet Members GiveHub Panel for 2022/23.

Prater Raines have been Nominet members since 2007. Tim applied to join the panel as he has extensive experience of evaluating competing bids and prioritisation through his time as a Councillor and Charity Trustee.

The Members’ GiveHub is an opportunity for Nominet members to support an organisation of their choice.

A fund of £50k each month is available. Applications are reviewed monthly by the GiveHub panel, a group of up to seven volunteers from the membership.

Members can apply for one grant for one organisation of up to £10,000 per financial year (1st April – 31st March) or multiple grants for multiple organisations up to a total of £10,000 per financial year. Organisations that receive funding will not be eligible for further funding until the next financial year regardless of the amount awarded.

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March 14, 2022
by Tim Prater

Building the Liberal Democrats’ Fleet

Liberal Democrats tech Blog website based on Typo3

Prater Raines are delighted that we have been selected to develop “Fleet”, a complete new website platform for the Liberal Democrats.

Prater Raines have been working with the Liberal Democrats since 2002. In that time, we’ve provided up to 300 local party websites through our custom built Foci service. So building on this expertise, we’re excited to be working alongside the Liberal Democrats on Fleet, their next generation website service.

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December 22, 2020
by Tim Prater

What’s in a Name?

HTTPS logo .eu domains

Prater Raines is an “accredited channel partner” (domain registrars and member) of Nominet, the .uk domain registry. We therefore receive regular news and updates from the industry. The most recent edition includes some interesting statistics of domain name registration growth this year. It’s clear that many businesses looked to move online at speed during the first, and second, UK Covid lockdowns.

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November 25, 2020
by Tim Prater

Lib Dem Draw 2020: Score-Score Draw

Lib dem Draw 2020 website screenshot

Lib Dem Draw  for 2020 is now being launched!

Back in 2018 Prater Raines were delighted to relaunch the long running Lib Dem Christmas Draw as an online draw.

The draw was run again in 2019 (despite much of the draw period being during an unexpected General Election campaign) and raised thousands again for Lib Dem Local Parties and other organisations, and is being run for 2020 now – the Lib Dem Draw 2020  date will be 10th December, with more great prizes!

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August 25, 2020
by Tim Prater

Advert for Prater Raines!

Prater Raines advert

An advert has been made for Prater Raines as part of our sponsorship of the Lib Dem Podcast.

We would like to thank our friends at Lib Dem Podcast for creating this advert for Prater Raines.  We are really impressed with their standard of work and their turnaround time.

The Lib Dem Podcast discusses the news, advice and commentary on UK and global political events.

If you haven’t listened to the Lib Dem Podcast yet you can watch it here. 

Listen to the latest Lib Dem pod cast here.

Read about how we can provide the technical expertise for organisations and campaign groups.

 

Lighthouse Liberal Democrats

Prater Raines are proud to be the developers of the Liberal Democrats’ membership management portal “Lighthouse”.

Lighthouse is an internal Party online management application, which gives the  secure access to Party information to the officers of the local party and other internal organisations that need it.

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February 25, 2020
by Tim Prater

HG Wells Short Story: A Site For Your Eyes

HG Wells Short Story Competition. Vision: Rig

Prater Raines are delighted to bring live the 2020 HG Wells Short Story Competition website. This website provides information about the competition, rules and is the only way to enter.

We are proud to be in our third year as sponsors for this competition.

The annual HG Wells Short Story Competition offers a £500 Senior and £1,000 Junior prize. The prize also includes a free publication of all shortlisted entries in a quality, professionally published paperback anthology. The prize also includes a  Kindle version.

Entry to the Junior competition is FREE and entry to the Senior competition is £10 (£5 for those with student ID).

This years theme is “Vision” – see how to enter (yes, pun intended) on their site – 2020 closing date is 6th July 2020.

September 13, 2019
by Tim Prater

Top Marks: Pack for President

Mark Pack

Some of the Prater Raines team have known Mark Pack for many years (probably rather more than any of us are prepared to admit). We were delighted when he approached us to become part of Mark’s campaign team to become the next President of the Liberal Democrats.

Mark announced his campaign on Thursday prior to the launch of conference, and his campaign website went live at the same time.  The Mark Pack President campaign site is built on WordPress and  there is much more to come. However,  the sign-up (feeding to MailChimp), donate (backed by Stripe) and contact pages are in place, and we’ll be adding more pages and content in coming days. Mark Pack  for President!

 

Whirlpool Product Recall

Only sometimes do you check the BBC News and find one of your websites being mentioned, but this is one of those days.

Some months ago, we were approached to build a standalone website to support the Whirlpool product recall.  We worked  to a limited but developing brief but we delivered the site as required.

It has since supported tends of thousands of their customers since to resolve issues with their dryers.

Today saw another burst of media activity around that recall. There was  a large increase in the number of people visiting the website. The site responded well throughout: the dryer checker (linked from within the site and hosted by Whirlpool themselves) was slower due to the sheer number of visitors.

September 9, 2019
by Tim Prater

Building a new Party Portal

Party Portal for the Liberal Democrats.. GDPR Compliance

Prater Raines are delighted to be working with the Liberal Democrats on the development of a new Local and Regional Party Portal. This is due to launch in January 2020.

The Portal will be a user friendly web interface to allow Local and Regional Party Officers to:

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