Intelligent Website Design and Development

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Test (May 15, 2013)

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Getting More From Pictures with Image Sliders on Foci2 (May 15, 2013)

Foci2 now offers the ability to add an image slider to your site. An image slider can be used to make your site more visually appealing and can also be used as a way of getting key campaigning messages across. The most important thing to consider when adding one is its purpose. Surrey County Council Lib Dems, for example, have used their image s...

The Foci2 Update for Lib Dem Website Managers: May 2013. Site Design and Image Slider Guide (May 15, 2013)

Carry on Campaigning Firstly, if you had elections on May 2nd we really hope you got the result you deserved. The results were better than the last two years, and although the Party did make losses (including my Folkestone West County seat - I'll be back!) the tide is clearly on the turn, and it's due to the work of every Lib Dem activist. Next:...

Getting More From Pictures with Image Sliders on Foci2 (May 14, 2013)

Foci2 now offers the ability to add an image slider to your site. An image slider can be used to make your site more visually appealing and can also be used as a way of getting key campaigning messages across. The most important thing to consider when adding one is its purpose. Surrey County Council Lib Dems, for example, have used their image...

The Foci2 Update for Lib Dem Website Managers: April 2013. Emails and Imports (Apr 3, 2013)

Happy April! Firstly, we hope you had a good Easter break, and want to wish all of our users facing elections this May the very best of luck. We know you are busy right now, so just wanted to mention a few recent updates to your website that we've introduced: Improved email formatting If you have sent emails to site users from your management ar...

The first for a while, but they're back! The Foci2 Update for Lib Dem Website Managers: March 2013 (Mar 18, 2013)

Thanks for Coming to See us at Conference Firstly, many thanks for all those who came to see us a Federal Conference last weekend in Brighton. We had a good weekend, and had the opportunity to demonstrate our snazzy new image slider component to a lot of administrators: it looks like it'll be a really well used feature! Snazzy New Image Slider A...

Alliance: For Everyone (Feb 28, 2013)

We're pleased today to be relaunching our site for the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and Alliance Party Leader David Ford with a new design and branding. Alliance and David have been clients of Prater Raines for many years. Both sites have undergone a number of refreshes in that time, but have now been moved to a common CMS which will offe...

Better search interfaces with ElasticSearch (Feb 21, 2013)

Today we've released our fourth website using ElasticSearch to provide search results. It's not exactly a milestone I know, but I wanted to write a bit about it because Elastic has rapidly become our search engine of choice for its combination of simplicity, speed, and good results out of the box. On this website, our Liberal Democrat sites, a...

Making our websites safer and faster (Feb 4, 2013)

Automated bots Over the years we've noticed a steady increase in the number of web requests we get from automated "bots" attempting to exploit our systems to send spam, spread malware, or get access to data they shouldn't have. Most often this manifests as repeated attempts to fill out our "send us your views" forms, attempts to sign in to Wordp...

Trust Us. We've Added a Picture. (Oct 10, 2012)

Research from New Zealand (reviewed on Lib Dem Voice) makes it clear how adding a photo to an article of page seems to make it more trustworthy just in itself. It doesn't even matter what the picture is of - its simple presence makes a difference. We've being saying for years that adding images to articles and pages add interest and attract mo...

Radical Middle Way website relaunch (Jul 27, 2012)

For the past few months it's been a real pleasure for Prater Raines to work with the Radical Middle Way website management team on their redesigned website, which launched earlier today. The organisation is a grassroots initiative created aftr the 2005 London bombings to articulate a mainstream understanding of Islam relevant to young British...

Foci clients: intermittent sign-out from management area (now fixed) (Jun 26, 2012)

A few of our Lib Dem Foci site users are experiencing an issue where they are being logged out of the back-end adminstration area unexpectedly. As it has not been affecting all users, and those seeing problems are not seeing the same issue consistently, it has been difficult to diagnose what is causing this, but we are working on it. We have put...

Circumstances Beyond Our Control... (May 31, 2012)

There are currently issues with the Internet. This just in from the excellent Custodian, with whom Prater Raines host our servers: Since 15:58 today the London Internet Exchange has been experiencing widescale issues resulting in large numbers of ISPs disconnecting from both the Juniper and Extreme LANs which LINX operate. We disconnected immed...

Card Payment Processing Failure: Now THAT'S an apology (May 22, 2012)

Firstly, an apology from Prater Raines. Any of our clients trying to pay us via our online card payment system on Friday were unable to do so until around 3pm due to a technical problem with our payment processing provider. We're pleased to say this was resolved by around 3pm, and the system should now be working normally. If you were attempting...

New website support contracts (Mar 26, 2012)

We've had a busy few months at Prater Raines taking on new website support contracts. Today we're proud to welcome the CIPR as just one of a wide range of new clients which also includes 8 content-managed websites, a document management system for a firm of solicitors, an online application for recording timesheets at an advertising agency, and ...