At Prater Raines we love spending time with you getting to know how your company works, so we can build you online tools and websites that ease your workload and allow you to get on with the thing you do best: running your business.
In recent weeks, we’ve spent time updating and improving the Sandgate Business Directory to be even better! There are new images of local businesses, opening hours and contact information.
As it is a difficult time with another Lockdown, we have added information about delivery and collection services that are currently being offered. Helping everyone to keep on going during this very difficult time!
Sandgate Business Directory offers a free entry for every local business. The directory contains a geolocated business finder with map view, based on OpenStreetMap. This links to a full page entry for each business. There are local events listed such as the Farmer’s market and local sports events. Built on WordPress and hosted and supported on our own UK servers.
Great to relaunch the Midas Training website this week. We rebuilt their existing site on WordPress, hosted and supported by us on our own UK based servers.
We moved all existing content from the former Midas Training website to the new one. In the process we fixed up some content on transfer, and set-up their WordPress site using our tried and tested WordPress solution.
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.
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!
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!
Come and join us for The Prater Raines Summer Party!
Over the August Bank Holiday weekend, Sandgate (where Prater Raines is based) holds an annual Sea and Food Festival. There’s free music, with a public fireworks display from the beach on the Saturday night. On the Sunday, there is a range of entertainment and food stalls.
Prater Raines are delighted to invite our customers down to visit Sandgate to join us for a few drinks, some food and fireworks on Saturday 25th August.
Nothing fancy: if the weather plays nicely, we’ll be on and around the beach: if not, in and around Sandgate & local pubs!
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.
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.