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.

The Madeira Botanical Garden Cable Car has launched its new multilingual website.

The Botanical Garden Cable Car, is situated in the Inn Quinta do Bom Sucesso – Madeira Island – seven minutes from the centre of Funchal city.

The site was developed by Navega Bem – Web Design and is crafted around the Open Source CMS Framework Joomla!
The site contains rich information about the island of Madeira and the locations between which the cable car runs. An interesting image gallery will entice any potential visitors to the island.

Visit the site of the Madeira Botanical Cable Car here.

Founded in September 1992 in Madeira Island – Portugal -  Inocentro was born from the desire to create and innovate.

Quickly, the company began to develop a packaging department with design and development.

Since the company began, it has been introducing new products and packaging, featuring a wide range of options in various sectors: retail, restaurants, hotels, office, industrial and signage.

In 2003, Inocentro opened its first store, with 3000m ² capacity in the city of Funchal, specializing in packaging and accessories for various industries.

Due to market demand and ambition for the company’s development came in 2007, the first delegation outside the Autonomous Region of Madeira with the opening of the factory in Matosinhos – Porto, where he was mobilized for production of packaging and accessories.

Inocentro’s ambitious market strategy and the demand for its products led to the opening of a factory in Matosinhos – Porto. This factory is the focal point for the production of packaging and accessories.

The new website has been developed by ‘Navega Bem – Web Design‘.

‘Navega Bem’ is a full service digital marketing, development and web design agency based on Madeira island, Portugal.

The site was developed around the Joomla CMS framework and Nooku – the innovative open source platform for Joomla.

Visit the new Inocentro online store 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.

Joomla 1.6 Tutorial issue 2 is now available at shops and Kiosks within Portugal. Exame Informática, Portugal´s leading IT Magazine is featuring a monthly tutorial which has been authored by Navega Bem – Web Design, based on Madeira island. The magazine issues so far have covered installing Joomla! 1.6 and local server software as well as how to create a template and add navigate, images and other content.

The long awaited Joomla! version 1.6 is now available in Beta and packs some digital punches in terms of all round improvements to what has become one of the most powerful CMS frameworks on the planet.

Team Navega Bem is currently in Wiesbaden, Germany – participating in the 1st International Joomla! Conference “JandBeyond” which is taking place between May 30th and June 2nd.

Learn more about how Joomla! can help your web presence here. If you are a web developer, you will find all the info you require at http://www.joomla.org

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.

Now available in shops in Portugal is the latest issue of the leading IT magazine ‘Exame Informática’. Navega Bem – Web Design, one of Portugal’s leading CMS website developers were commissioned to write a series of tutorials covering the open source framework Joomla 1.6 which is soon to become available in Beta.

The tutorials cover the fundamentals of Joomla and explains in detail how to install the software, configuration and template setup. If you want to get and up and running with Joomla – these articles will do it for you. It really is quite easy to setup your own web site.

So what exactly is Joomla? It is a ‘free’ open source framework and content publishing system designed for quickly creating highly interactive multi-language Web sites, online communities, media portals, blogs and eCommerce applications.

The name ‘Joomla!’ is derived from the Swahili word for ‘all together’. Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization effective. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.  Best of all Joomla! is opens source and freely available to everyone.

Who uses Joomla!

Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications. Here are just some of the ways this award winning CMS solution is used:

Corporate websites or portals
Real Estate Agent Websites
Online commerce
Hotel and Tourism websites
Small business websites
Non-profit and organizational websites
Government applications
Corporate intranets and extranets
School and church websites
Personal or family homepages
Community-based portals
Magazines and newspapers
the possibilities are seemingly endless…

It can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalogue, processing credit card payments or taking online reservations.

New Features of Joomla! 1.6 include:

Nested Categories – No More Section/Category/Article forced hierarchy.
Granular ACL System – Set specific access permissions based on a user’s group to components, menu items, and much more.
Tableless Core Components – Not talked about as widely, but still just as wonderful is the move to make most/all core components use tableless layouts (when tables shouldn’t be used, that is).  This is great for design, SEO, and general scalability going forward.
Article linker plugin for editors
New frontend template
New backend template
New uploader for media manager

If you can read Portuguese and want all info about Joomla 1.6 before the Beta launch – get the May 2010 copy of Exame Informática – available in shops and kiosks now.

Follow this link visit our web design portfolio

They say “If it’s happening in Madeira – it’s on Acontece Madeira“.

Acontece Madeira is the events portal for Madeira island and Porto Santo that has information on everything that is going on. Cinema, events, exhibitions, music, theatre, conferences, nightlife, kids events, concerts and much more!

Acontece Madeira was born out of the simple fact that it wasn’t possible to find information in one place easily and quickly. In collaboration in with all the councils on the island and many other institutes, groups and clubs – Acontece Madeira supplies current information for the whole island of Madeira and Porto Santo.

Further development will ensure that the portal continues to grow and is as easy as possible to navigate. The addition of interactive image and video galleries is now underway. Multilingual content is also very likely within the coming months.

Developed by Navega Bem – Web Design, the information portal was officially launched last year in August at the ‘Café Teatro’ in Funchal. Having been highly successful due to the collaboration of many entities, it became apparent that the high volume of events required a more intuitive user interface for both input and display. Therefore the site has been ported away from Wordpress into the Joomla CMS framework.

If you are an organisation that regularly stages events and would like to collaborate with Acontece Madeira – please contact the site administrator. They can feature your events and even give you personal access to add your events whenever you wish.

For those times you need to know about Madeira island events – Visit Acontece Madeira!

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.