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.
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.
We’ve been delighted to work on Major Foodie since moving to our hosting a few weeks ago, and have already delivered the first batch of changes that site owner Richard had been seeking.
The changes have been about evolution not revolution: tweaking design and functionality to be easier to use, work better on a range of devices and make reviews and content east to find – all to Richard’s specification.
As examples of the changes, on the home page we’ve reworked the main image slider, making it resize nicely whatever screen size (and orientation) of device you are reading on, adding captions to each picture and a click through to the relevant review in each case. We’ve also added a bespoke styled Twitter feed to bring their very active Twitter presence to the front page of the site in a style that fits well with the rest of the content rather than a standard plug-in.
When we first met Major Foodie, his WordPress site had been going some time, and although he was, in the main, happy with it there were some changes and upgrades that his previous developers hadn’t been able to deliver.
A little while after our first discussions the site started to have problems, and, when we investigated it became clear it had been hacked.
We cleaned the site on its existing shared hosting, updated and re-set logins and passwords, restored files (from a back-up we’d taken when we first met – there was otherwise no regular backup in place), updated PHP, the WordPress install itself and the plug-ins to the site which were out of date, and generally got things back up and running.
We’ve been proud to be the website provider for the cross-community Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for over eleven years, and throughout that period, the magnificent David Ford has been Party Leader.
It was with real sadness that we learned David was standing down as Leader a few weeks ago, but we were equally delighted to learn former Alliance MP Naomi Long was standing to take over from him.
On the day of her election we helped Alliance get a new splash screen on the front page of their introducing Naomi as Leader in place, and encouraging supporters of the Party to sign up as members.