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.
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.
We do a lot of work with the Charted Institute of Public Relations, including supporting their main corporate Drupal based site, the “Influence” site of curated aggregated content from their members based on WordPress and CIPR Ladder (member login required to view) which is their bespoke CPD (Continuous Professional Development) platform.
This year CIPR have again run their annual “Summer of CPD” to encourage professional development. To support their work on this, CIPR needed some new detailed reports from their CPD system to support their weekly, regionally based updates on the CPD achievements of their members.
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.