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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
We were delighted in 2018 to work with Tendo Consulting on the End Our Pain website. Although they achieved a number of the campaign goals last year, there is still work left to do. Maybe you can sign up to support them?
From a recent email from them:
“Last year, as a supporter of the End Our Pain campaign, you helped secure the legalisation of medical cannabis under prescription. Unfortunately, we need to ask for your help again. The policy is simply not working. Patients do not have access to what is now a legal medicine in the UK and are being left to suffer needlessly. Some of them are children with intractable epilepsy.
We are pleased to bring live a website for Oxford Musical Theatre. The site is based on WordPress and has songs from the shows which can be downloaded. There are shows such as ‘Guilty of Love’ which is a show about Alan Turing and “CLD” which is about the real Lewis Carroll. Show your support for musical theatre by taking a look at current and past performances.
The website for Oxford Musical Theatre offers a range of scores for choral editions of songs by Jane Bramwell and Michael Brand. There are publications and the latest information on their performances.
We work with organisations and companies, understanding their needs and working with them. Ranging from bespoke builds to customising off-the-shelf products – is what we do.
SCA: Strong Customer Authentication is coming. This is will change the way a large number of credit and debit card transactions that happen online.
At Prater Raines we will be working with all of our clients that take online payments, to ensure their systems are compliant. The SCA regulation will reduce the incidence of fraud and increase security. It will introduce a two-factor authentication on electronic payments.
Any clients that use GoCardless (the DD based payment / donation processor) will unlikely see any changes. Additionally, following an initial set up businesses taking recurring payments by card will not be effected. There is a blog post explaining more about how they expect these SCA changes to effect their payments in the future.
For almost 20 years, Lib Dem Image have been the official supplier of Liberal Democrat merchandise, campaign materials, clothing, gifts & books. In 2005, we developed Lib Dem Image’s first online shop. Previously they had sold only via phone and mail order and from stalls at Party conferences. Although it was developed on a tight budget, the online shop swiftly became the main sales platform. It has been clear that the site needed some investment but LDI and the Party had not been in the position to invest in a significant refresh. The 2005 site had continued to trade and work securely and effectively, with a few tweaks and a very limited investment in development.
In 2018, Lib Dem Image and the Party agreed a new long term agreement to extend LDI’s contract as official supplier. This gave all sides the confidence to invest in updating their web site. As our experience of working with Lib Dem Image had spanned over 13 years it gave us a real knowledge of their service and needs. We were therefore delighted they spoke to us about the re-development!
The re-launch of LibDem Image!
We are proud to launch the new Lib Dem Image website. It is based on WooCommerce and WordPress, and now fully mobile and tablet friendly. We provide the hosting on our own UK based secure WordPress hosting. Stripe takes the payments, which offers good value to LDI a with full API and seamless integration into WooCommerce, which we enjoyed!