Security update: Your website is being protected

On 21 October, critical security vulnerabilities affecting PHP, the technology behind WordPress and many other websites, required urgent action across the hosting industry.

Castlegate IT worked closely with our hosting providers to prepare for the necessary security updates. Importantly, our hosting partners and Cloudflare implemented additional firewall protections before the security patches were released, helping to protect websites against attempts to exploit these vulnerabilities.

The necessary patches have now been applied across our main managed hosting environments. A small number of legacy environments remain protected by additional firewall measures while their updates are completed.

No action is required from our clients. We continue to monitor the situation and manage the necessary security measures on their behalf.

A new site for Royal Fireworks Press

Royal Fireworks Press is an long-established publisher of books for gifted children over the pond in the USA. We built a site for them way back in the day, which by now was  starting to look really long-in-the-tooth.

Their site serves as a catalogue and e-commerce portal. As well as a bright, clean redesign, the new site incorporates two different versions: one aimed at people using their books in schools, and another version for their large homeschooler users. Users get asked which version they want to see on their first visit, but they can switch between the two modes at will.

The two-site system allows the site administrators flexibility in whether content appears on either or both versions – whether that be products, pages or paragraphs.

Royal Fireworks Press is our most popular e-commerce website, and we’re very proud of it. Since the re-design the website has experienced a 14% increase in sales, which we hope will continue. Royal Fireworks were clearly happy – they bought us a bottle of fizz to say thanks!

The site provides functionality, good visual layout and is highly ranked in search engines, all encouraging customers to buy books for homeschoolers or school language arts books.
The site was developed using CodeIgniter PHP Framework, with customised WordPress CMS, Mal’s e-commerce and Issuu integration.