HG Wells Short Story Competition. Vision: Rig

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.

Mark Pack

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!

 

Whirlpool Product Recall

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.

Party Portal for the Liberal Democrats.. GDPR Compliance

Prater Raines are delighted to be working with the Liberal Democrats on the development of a new Local and Regional Party Portal. This is due to launch in January 2020.

The Portal will be a user friendly web interface to allow Local and Regional Party Officers to:

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Oxford Musical Theatre: Cover / poster of "King and Country", "Longer than it takes to say Goodbye" and "CLD"

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.

Can we help you?

SCA: Debit and Credit Cards

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.

Lib Dem Image

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!

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Liberal Democrat Christmas Draw

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.

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Happy New year deal

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!

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End Our Pain Campaign to Legalise Medical Cannabis

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.

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