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!
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.
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.
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!
In September 2017, the management of the Liberal Democrat Christmas Draw told us they were hanging up their tombola wheel. It made us dad that they were going to stop the draw after over 20 years.
The Lib Dem Christmas Draw was a nationally organised ticket based raffle run by a team of volunteers since 1995. In that time, it raised well over half a million pounds for local parties and central Lib Dem funds. Party members, supporters their families and friends won over 800 prizes.
However, in recent years there had been a fall in the number of Local Parties participating. Much of this was due to the amount of work that was involved for the Local Parties and the draw organisers. Tasks such as ordering, distributing, collecting and sending back the tickets, stubs and money. Buying the tickets became more inconvenient as the use of cheques fell. The draw looked to be on the way out.
But it remained a great idea, and a really strong fundraiser for the Party. So after discussion, we were delighted to be commissioned to develop and launch the new online Liberal Democrat Christmas Draw.
Happy New year deal! After a great Christmas and New Year break, it’s always nice to be back in the office – Happy New Year!
Although we’ve been monitoring and checking email and voicemails throughout the Christmas period, we’re now back up to full speed.
You can call us on 01303 905245 from 9am-5pm Monday to Friday, or email info@praterraines.co.uk to get in touch. Alternatively, if you live near our Sandgate HQ then you can drop in there to have a chat – always happy to see you.
New Year special deal
Is this the time to finally get your company website sorted? We’ve got Happy New Year deal to help you meet that New Year resolution – we’ll set you up new basic WordPress website for just £250 plus VAT * this January – HALF our usual price!
Read why it is important to update your WordPress site.
We pride ourselves on our WordPress hosting, which watches for new updates and patches to WordPress for our clients. These updates are then applied automatically.
There’s a really good reason for doing so. If you don’t, your site is more exposed to exploits and other vulnerabilities putting your data (and that of your users) and site at risk. Hosting WordPress yourself can be a few quid cheaper a month. But you need a robust process in place to ensure you are updating your installation – at least daily.
We were delighted to be asked by our friends at Tendo Consulting to help with work on the End Our Pain campaign , which is a Campaign to Legalise Medical Cannabis. We started by moving their existing campaign website onto WordPress. When the new site was updated the “Email Your MP” functionality was put into place. This “Email Your MP” functionality was developed by us to help people lobby their MP directly.
You may have seen a lot of coverage (in the Mail on Sunday, across the BBC and elsewhere) about Alfie Dingley. Alfie suffers from severe epilepsy needs medical cannabis to control his epilepsy. The news coverage and Social Media support from a huge range of people including Patrick Stewart – saw THOUSANDS email their MP. Many thousands more signed the End Our Pain petition.