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.
We’re proud to be supporting the HG Wells Short Story Competition in 2018, providing their website and giving Facebook support. It’s great to see that this year’s competition is going well (get your entries in by 23 July!).
We rebuilt their site onto our own WordPress hosting (including SSL support, daily backups, keeping WordPress updated with all the most recent patches and updates etc), and new for 2018 created the online entry process, replacing the former post or email entry system.
Prater Raines are delighted to be accredited by the Liberal Democrats as an Approved Supplier under their GDPR compliance programme. We’ve been supplying websites for the Party for over 15 years, so really hoped we would!
The accreditation is for our Lib Dem “Foci” website service as a “Website, Email, Campaigns and Social Media Platform”.
However, our WordPress installations and support are acknowledged to meet their GDPR compliance requirements as well. Our WordPress sites have UK hosting and always run on the latest version. They automatically upgrade on your behalf, ensuring data is stored within the local WordPress database. Additionally providing regular plugin updates and built-in SSL support.
Tendo Consulting approached us to make some updates to the Fair Tax on Flying site which was part of a campaign they were working on for a client.
There were a number of content changes to the site. A key new feature required was to rebuild the existing “Email an MP” functionality. This was designed to use up to date open source data and give the ability to look up the appropriate MP from a supplied postcode. Additionally, then providing different suggested email texts based on the user’s selections.
This we did, building our own WordPress plugins to add the functionality. This project involved updating an existing site on its own existing hosting. As the hosting was not provided by us, it did add some complexity to the project. However, we’re really pleased with the result!
We work with organisations and companies, understanding their needs and working with them. We can provide an “Email Your MP “functionality to your campaign.
Nuff said: new WordPress site set-ups from £250 + VAT.
WordPress hosting and support just £20 + VAT per month per site.
Secure SSL hosting, DDoS protection and backups as standard.
Well this IS nice: an article on our local paper about the H G Wells Short Story Competition 2017, with Prater Raines named as a sponsor.
The Prater Raines team took on the running of their WordPress website for the competition in 2017, providing volunteer support to manage the site, update content and editing the site.
Now that we’ve set up our multisite WordPress network, the next problem is going to be moving the content from our multiple existing single site installations into the multisite network.
Last week I went into detail about how we’ve simplified our procedure for keeping WordPress up to date by using Composer for dependency management. Stage two in our process to clean up our many separate installations of WordPress is to create a single “network” where all the sites on our server share the same core code and plugins. Why update 19 installations when you can just update one?
Prater Raines launched our 19th WordPress website recently, a petition campaigning for justice for the marginalised children of Vietnamese mothers and South Korean fathers born during the Vietnam War.
Our support contract with clients always includes backing up their data and keeping their website secure and easy to modify in future by making sure it’s running the latest version of WordPress and any contributed plugins. This has been a fairly manual process for a while and it felt like a good time to streamline things a little.