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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.