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 support a suite of websites for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations: their Influence PR article aggregating site based on WordPress, their bespoke CPD platform Ladder and the main CIPR website based on Drupal.
When we took over the management and maintenance of their websites a few years ago, it was clear that the Drupal site – based on Drupal 6 – was going to need to be updated at some stage. At that time Drupal 8 was still in Beta, and we were expecting to move straight from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 when it was fully available.
On Saturday 8th July we are planning on moving our server array to a larger “rack” with our existing datacentre (we’re remaining with our excellent hosting partner Custodian). The move is to allow us to further enhance the security and resilience of our servers by introducing a new hardware firewall and remote access capability across our systems.
In physical terms, it means powering off all servers and switch, unwiring, removing from their existing location, moving to a new one (about 100m away!), putting into their new home, rewiring and bringing back online.
Prater Raines Ltd are delighted to announce that Stewart Christie will be joining their growing team from mid-April.
Sandgate-based Prater Raines develop and support websites and data systems for a wide variety of clients. They formed in 2002, developing a website service that rapidly grew to be the largest supplier of Lib Dem websites.
SDC Systems is a company that understands security vulnerability so when they wanted to host their own WordPress site we didn’t mind!
Although we recommend that we host your website for you, it doesn’t have to be that way…
We were approached in April 2016 by data software and security company SDC Systems. They were looking to move their website from a legacy system to WordPress. This was in order to make the site easier to update and add new content.
Initially they wanted the change to occur with the minimum of design changes. They also wanted to continue to host their new site in-house as they clearly had significant technical expertise. We did so for them, porting their content and site structure with a limited number of changes in under two working days – all to time and specification.
Each month, we pay a $50 subscription to a US software company for use of their anti-spam and anti-virus product across our sites (just one more service we provide for our customers!).
On looking at our accounts for the last year, the payments in pounds sterling for that 50 US dollars a month have been:
- 05-03-2016 £36.14
- 05-04-2016 £36.30
- 05-05-2016 £35.47
We’ve been delighted to work on Major Foodie since moving to our hosting a few weeks ago, and have already delivered the first batch of changes that site owner Richard had been seeking.
The changes have been about evolution not revolution: tweaking design and functionality to be easier to use, work better on a range of devices and make reviews and content east to find – all to Richard’s specification.
As examples of the changes, on the home page we’ve reworked the main image slider, making it resize nicely whatever screen size (and orientation) of device you are reading on, adding captions to each picture and a click through to the relevant review in each case. We’ve also added a bespoke styled Twitter feed to bring their very active Twitter presence to the front page of the site in a style that fits well with the rest of the content rather than a standard plug-in.
When we first met Major Foodie, his WordPress site had been going some time, and although he was, in the main, happy with it there were some changes and upgrades that his previous developers hadn’t been able to deliver.
A little while after our first discussions the site started to have problems, and, when we investigated it became clear it had been hacked.
We cleaned the site on its existing shared hosting, updated and re-set logins and passwords, restored files (from a back-up we’d taken when we first met – there was otherwise no regular backup in place), updated PHP, the WordPress install itself and the plug-ins to the site which were out of date, and generally got things back up and running.
We’ve been proud to be the website provider for the cross-community Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for over eleven years, and throughout that period, the magnificent David Ford has been Party Leader.
It was with real sadness that we learned David was standing down as Leader a few weeks ago, but we were equally delighted to learn former Alliance MP Naomi Long was standing to take over from him.
On the day of her election we helped Alliance get a new splash screen on the front page of their introducing Naomi as Leader in place, and encouraging supporters of the Party to sign up as members.
Our friends at Custodian DC (the award winning data-centre where we host our main server array) have today enabled their DDoS mitigation service for all sites we host.
We’ve seen a couple of DDoS attacks on sites we host, and they are difficult* to deal with, and generally take the website offline for a period of time. The Custodian DDoS service deals with the problem differently. They explain:
“Once you have subscribed to the service, should you come under a DDoS attack (either detected by our systems or reported by you), we move your network connection behind our mitigation service. The service can withstand attacks up to 800Gbps (the unofficial world record for a DDoS attack is 500Gbps). The service absorbs the large amount of traffic and ‘cleans’ it. The clean traffic is then delivered to you as normal.”
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.