Ô Hotels & Resorts has launched a new portal promoting the Portuguese regions of Vimeiro and Monfortinho. Four character hotels in these regions have come together under a unique, single standard of excellence.

Hotel Golf Mar, Hotel das Termas, Hotel Astoria and Hotel Fonte Santa are now offering a perfect balance between adventure, discovery and well-being, lying at the heart of a rich heritage of protected landscapes.

The Ô Hotels & Resorts portal has been developed by Navega Bem – Web Design, which is a full service digital marketing, development and web design agency based on Madeira island, Portugal.

Chris Szabo, MD of Navega Bem explained “We are very pleased that we were chosen to develop this project. The design was created by one of Portugal’s leading brand and communication company’s ‘Brandia Central’ and our brief was to bring the portal to life. We were able to add our own innovations and the project has come together in a very structured and transparent way. Our software engineer Diego has been responsible for the project and has demonstrated a very high level of professionalism in bringing this project to fruition.”

“We have developed the site with Joomla! 1.5 and K2.
Joomla! is a dynamic portal engine and content management system.
K2 is a powerful content component for Joomla! with CCK-like features developed by JoomlaWorks.
The way K2 integrates into Joomla has given us a powerful hotels portal that is very user friendly and will be simple to maintain by the hotels.”

“The Ô Hotels & Resorts portal is available in 4 languages. This is not ordinarily an easy task in any CMS framework, but we use Joom!Fish. This is a sophisticated extension for Joomla! and it allows us to present a website in multiple languages easily.”

“Any web project using Joomla! that requires content in different languages and processes which help to keep track of the translations will find that the Joom!Fish extension does exactly this.”

Visit the new Ô Hotels & Resorts portal here.

This charming Madeira Quinta that was built in the 18th century has become Madeira islands most sought after luxury botanical garden hotel.

During the Napoleonic wars General Beresford, Commander of the British forces on the island chose it as his residence. His magnificent sideboard, a reminder of his stay, still adorns the majestic dining room.

Today the Quinta, with 31 double rooms, 4 historical Junior Suites and 5 Premier Suites, all facing south to the gardens and the blue Atlantic ocean, have been lovingly designed to offer the best accommodation in modern functionality and traditional comfort and style, for a luxury holiday in Madeira Island.

The exclusive property is the favoured location for many celebrities and heads of state. A long list of prominent guests include Mr. Helmut Schmidt, ex-Chancellor of Germany. Sir. Peter O’Toole (a legend in the world of cinema). President of the European Parliament Dr. Durão Barroso and Dr. Alberto João Jardim, President of the Madeira Government. Local rumours also tell of many visits by Madonna, but discretion on the part of the hotel leaves us unable to confirm this.

This elegant Madeira Hotel has now launched its new website and invites the curious and potential guests alike to visit the site and see in great detail what it is that makes Quinta Jardins do Lago such a special and beautiful choice for a holiday retreat. This is without exception one of, if not the top ‘Quintas da Madeira’.

The new web presence has been carefully crafted by Navega Bem – Web Design, a full service digital marketing, development and web design agency which is also based on Madeira island, Portugal.

Navega Bem’s MD and Creative Director Chris Szabo explained “we have always admired Quinta Jardins do Lago since it was first opened. We were very honoured to be asked to develop the new website and we hope we have done this amazing botanical garden hotel justice with our efforts. We have spent many a day on the property – officially for research motives – but in all honesty it is just a wonderful and calming place to be.”

“The website has been developed around the Open Source framework and content management system Joomla! Now that the initial phase is complete and the site has been published online, we will add additional languages and focus on achieving the best possible ranking in the search engines.”

To visit the new website of Quinta Jardins do Lago and enter an elegant world of Comfort, Charm and Beauty – go to www.jardinsdolago.com

On Madeira Island, in the verdant parish of Camacha you can find some of the most charming self catering cottages, true jewels of rural tourism, located in an ancient agricultural property in Vale Paraíso.

Casas Valleparaízo is the perfect choice for the family to experience the authenticity of country life in an environment surrounded by orchards, gardens, birds and farm animals.

Visitors to Madeira island can now book these self catering cottages online in the new website which was recently launched.

These rural tourism gemstones promise a pleasant experience of privacy and quietness, an escape from labour turmoil and everyday life to all nature lovers.

The site has been carefully crafted by Navega Bem – Web Design using the Open Source CMF Framework Joomla!
The website designer Sara Lomelino explained “Casa Valleparaízo is a very unique estate of self catering properties and we have tried to reflect this in the design of the site.”

Visit Casas Valleparaízo – Madeira Island here.

Navega Bem – Web Design were invited to Palheiro Golf to make a presentation about ‘Social Networking’ and ‘Social Media’.

Jonathan Fletcher, Chairman of Palheiro Golf invited Navega Bem to give the Group an insight into the marketing possibilities that are available with specific social media such as Facebook and Twitter etc…

Management and staff from Palheiro Real Estate, Palheiro Village, Palheiro Golf, Estalagem Casa Velha do Palheiro and Palheiro Rentals were present.

With a solid basic Social Networking structure already in place that is producing very positive results, the Group is now focusing on consolidating their various networking accounts and devising an efficient feed that will disseminate news, promotions and special offers.

Over the last 12 months all the group sites have been migrated to the Joomla CMS framework and all within the corporate identity guidelines. Social Networking has been introduced into all the sites and this is being further expanded to incorporate new and upcoming innovations.

Chris Szabo, MD of Navega Bem made the presentation and the complete design and development team from Madeira were at hand to answer questions.

What is Google AdWords and how can it help you?

AdWords is Google’s pay-per-click advertising system that powers AdSense. More about AdSense later.

Imagine you could advertise your business in a magazine and that you only actually paid a very small amount of money for that advert if someone actually read it. In essence, that is the concept of Pay-per-click.

Pay-per-click means that someone advertising will pay every time a visitor clicks on their advert and is then taken to the advertiser’s website.

You can use AdWords to bring targeted traffic to your web site by creating ads and choosing keywords related to your business.
Advertisers do not pay to create their adverts (ads) with AdWords, it is totally free and as many ads can be created as required.
AdWords will then place your ads on Google when people search for your specified keywords.  AdWords is a pay-per-click system so the only time you pay is when AdWords brings targeted users to your web site. If your ad is displayed 10 times or 10.000 times…. you don’t pay anything. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad.

This is a very effective form of online marketing indeed. Millions of businesses around the world use AdWords.

So what does it actually cost to use AdWords?
Let us suppose you run a business that sells ‘bananas’.
You have a wonderful website that has all the info a banana fan could ever wish for. You don’t get many visits to your website, perhaps because it is not a very search engine friendly website – or perhaps you just have a lot of competitors selling bananas as well.

So you decide to try Google AdWords. The first thing you need to do is create an AdWords campaign. This is very much like creating an advertising campaign with a brochure or a flyer. Only in this case – your campaign will be online. You create your campaigns within the AdWords website and Google will assist you with each and every step.

Here is a dummy campaign example for your bananas:

You can create as many of these campaigns as you wish. If for example, you create three differently worded campaigns – Google will rotate them for you and after a few days you will be able to log in to your account and see which campaign performed best. Deleting campaigns or creating new ones is fast and easy.

Once you have created your AdWords campaign you can specify how much money you are willing to spend on advertising. This is what we call the ‘budget’ and for the sake of our bananas let us suppose we are willing to spend €5 per day.

Once we have set our budget, Google will display our ads for as long as we have not exhausted that €5. If we spend our full budget on a particular day, Google will suspend our campaign until the following day. This way we can always be sure that we are not overspending and don’t need to worry about turning our AdWords campaign off at any time.

So lets us assume we are willing to pay 25 cents each time someone clicks on our AdWords campaign and visits our site. That would mean our ads can be clicked on 20 times in one day before our budget limit is reached. 25 cents is actually what we are willing to pay-per-click. This payment is called a ‘bid’. Starting to make sense now?

But there is more!! Not only do we set a daily budget – we also choose how much money we are willing to spend each time someone clicks on our ad for specific keywords. It is these keywords that are responsible for our ads being shown in the first place.

Let’s talk about ‘keywords’.
When we setup an AdWords campaign we don’t actually specify the bid for a campaign – we choose keywords and it is these individual keywords that we bid on. Follow our example…

Remember our dummy campaign:

Before we publish our campaign for the world to see – we choose keywords related to our bananas that we think people will search for when looking for our product.

So let’s choose the following keywords:
bananas,
fruit,
fresh fruit,
ripe bananas,
bananas vitamins,
portugal bananas.

Now we can set our bids for the individual keywords.
Perhaps we are willing to pay 20 cents for the word ‘banana’ – as it is such a global term and not confined to a specific location. Perhaps we choose to pay 35 cents for the keyword ‘portugal bananas’ – because this phrase is much more relative to your business.

But there is a little more you need to know. The amount we pay per click – determines the position at which our ads are displayed in a Google search page.

Imagine you have a competing company down the street and they are also running an AdWords campaign to sell their bananas. If they are willing to pay 30 cents per click and you are paying 25 cents for a specific keyword – their ad would be at the top of the AdWords list and yours would appear below it. To display your ad above theirs – you would have to increase your bid to more than 30 cents.

You can at any time change your payment settings and increase or decrease the amount you are willing to pay per click – as well as your daily budget.
Google AdWords is very comprehensive and very helpful when you set up your campaigns. Google will show you what the maximum bids are and also simulate the position your ads will appear at as well as how many clicks you can expect.

So we have now completed our campaign setup. If we pay money into our AdWords account and activate our campaign – each time someone searches in Google using one of the keywords we have specified, our ad will appear. And it will continue to appear as long as we have not reached our budget limit. If someone clicks on our ads we pay the amount of money we bid for the specific keyword used in the search. Simple, quite straightforward and very effective.

This has been a very basic introduction. Google AdWords can do so much more. You can choose where in the world you want your ads to appear in and you can create campaigns in different languages. You can specify where your ads will not appear. Google also has some very intuitive tools to help you create you campaigns. Probably one of the most helpful is the ‘Keyword Tool’, which will show you the most popular keywords used for your products or services and how often they were used in the last month.

There is another side of Google you may want to check out and that is Google AdSense.

If you have a website and would like to earn some money from advertising on your site – you can use AdSense to display AdWords campaigns on your site. Each and every time someone clicks on an ad within your website, you get paid paid a percentage of the revenue.

To learn more about how you can benefit from Google’s online marketing strategies follow these links: Google Adwords – Google AdSense.
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This introduction to Google AdWords was authored by Chris Szabo, MD, Navega Bem -Web Design Lda. Madeira island – Portugal.

Planning a trip to Madeira island? Visiting Madeira island on a cruise liner?

Madeira Happy Tours have launched their new and informative website which caters fully to the islands visitors who wish to experience the breathtaking scenery, sights and hidden gems of Madeira.

Every day Madeira Happy Tours have island tours to all parts of the island. Additionally, they organize Madeira Levada walks for those visitors that want to feel the beauty of Madeira close up.

Marco Ferreira, managing director of Madeira Happy Tours explained “since we founded the company we have built a commendable reputation and we receive many letters and emails from our clients thanking us for our services. From our base at Monumental Lido, tours and Levada walks take place daily – and we believe our forte is that we don’t do ‘mass tourism’ coach tours. We offer personalized, friendly tours with government approved staff who know the island intimately and therefore give very informative and often amusing details.”

“Unlike the big Madeira island coach tours, where dozens of people are in one bus and the stops are always chaotic as everyone jostles for the best photo opportunities – in our luxury air-conditioned mini-coaches we make longer stops and more stops for small groups so that everyone can really appreciate what they came to see; the beauty of Madeira island”.

“We provide Shorex services for visitors arriving on Cruise Ships. Passengers can get in touch with us on our website to arrange their ‘Madeira island Coach Tours’ and of course we pick up and return guests to their Cruise liner”.

The new site was developed by CMS specialists – Navega Bem – Web Design and was built around the award winning Joomla! framework.

To experience Madeira island at its best – visit Madeira Happy Tours.

Hotel websites can get their prices into Google Maps: Google Maps is often one of the first sites travelers visit to find and compare hotels. Today Google started experimenting with a new feature, for the time being only visible to a small portion of users, to help make that process even easier by showing specific prices for selected hotel listings.

This is great news for consumers. With this feature, when you search for hotels on Google Maps you’ll be able to enter the dates you plan to stay and see real prices on selected listings. You can click on the price to see a list of advertisers who have provided pricing information for that hotel, indicated by the “Sponsored” text, and click through to reserve a room on the advertiser’s site. By showing you this relevant hotel rate information directly in the Google Maps results panel Google  hopes to make this aspect of your trip planning more speedy and efficient – so you can get where you’re going and enjoy your travel destination!

A potential visitor to Madeira island for example could quickly compare prices to all hotels with ’sponsored’ listings. Although the trend is more and more to visit independent hotel websites and evaluate services, location and ratings – this is certainly a tool full of promise for certain sectors of the hospitality market.

Here’s an example of the Google Maps results for someone who is searching for hotels in New York City:

This new feature will not change the way that hotels are ranked in Google Maps. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance (where indicated) and other factors, regardless of whether there is an associated price.

Whilst Google is experimenting with this feature, they are currently working with a limited number of advertisers and it will only be visible to a small portion of users . As always, they will evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of this new feature based on both data and feedback, and hope to make it available to more users and offer prices from more partners over time.

To learn more about smart hotel websites – visit Navega Bem Web Design.
To learn more about Google Maps and Hotel Prices follow this link.

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The Hotel Royal Orchid is a 4 star hotel, is situated on the sunny south coast of Madeira Island, on the touristic area of Caniço de Baixo. Strategically positioned on the seafront, the Hotel presents its guests with a magnificent panoramic view over the Atlantic Ocean.

The Royal Orchid is the ideal place for relaxing holidays away from the daily bustle of Funchal, the Madeiran capital.

The stylish new website for Hotel Royal Orchid has been developed by Hotel web design specialists ‘Navega Bem – Web Design‘ – based in Funchal, Madeira.

Chris Szabo, MD and Creative Director explained “Royal Orchid is one of Madeira islands most popular Caniço located hotels. It is very fashionable with the more sophisticated tourists in the middle-age group. The hotel offers a vast array of facilities and is very much in demand by diving enthusiasts. Also very popular is the amazing Nautilus Health Club.”

“We have developed the site to reflect the stylish hotel and the programming is based around Joomla 1.5 – the award winning CMS (content management system). This will allow the hotel to manage the site themselves very easily and without the need to ask for our help. Joomla allows very simple management and no technical expertise or programming knowledge is required.”

The Royal Orchid Hotel has a total of 98 rooms:
- 71 Studios
- 25 Júnior Suites
- 1 Sénior Suite
- 1 Penthouse

All the rooms are equipped with kitchenette, private bathroom (with bathtub/shower), hairdryer, direct dial telephone, rádio/cable and satellite television, air-conditioning and rental safe. The sea view rooms have a balcony.
Visit Hotel Royal Orchid here: www.hotelroyalorchid.com

Located in the hills above Funchal in the Palheiro Estate, Casa Velha do Palheiro is a graceful 5 star Madeira country house hotel, with 37 luxurious rooms.

The award winning Casa Velha website has now changed its identity to match the corporate look of the Palheiro Estate group. The site now boasts a fast and responsive user interface with online reservations, quality video feeds, high resolution image gallery and ample information about the Palheiro Golf course, Palheiro Gardens, Palheiro Estate and the Madeira Marlin Sportfishing boat ‘Balancal’.

The hotel is situated next to the famous Palheiro Gardens, originally created over 200 years ago by the 1st Count of Carvalhal. There is also direct access to the stunning Palheiro Golf Course, with privileged tee offs from the halfway house, a short stroll from the gate.
Within the grounds there is a heated swimming pool with sauna and steam bath: Tennis or croquet, billiards or walking: the choice is yours. Our private motor yacht ‘Balancal’ awaits your pleasure at Funchal marina. It is available for coastal cruises, swimming, dolphin and whale watching, as well as deep sea big game fishing and special charters.

Casa Velha do Palheiro is the ideal hotel for the visiting golfer, as it is the only hotel on the island situated right next to a golf course.

The new Palheiro Spa is a perfect complement to the existing attractions at the Casa Velha. Highly regarded local architect Bruno Martins, has integrated rustic elements with the classic style of the 200 year old Casa Velha hotel to ensure the new spa enhances the site.

“Palheiro Spa has been designed as an extension of the natural surroundings”, says Jonathan Fletcher, director of Palheiro Estate, “with local materials and native planting used wherever possible.”

Direct flights run from 13 airports in the UK to Funchal and take just over three hours. Airlines include easyJet, TAP Portugal, First Choice, Thomsonfly, Thomas Cook and Fly Globespan.

Visit the Casa Velha do Palheiro website here: www.casa-velha.com