CMS Solutions

TOPcasas Imobiliária was founded in 2004 and has built a formidable reputation as a professional Real Estate company specializing in the non-resident market.

With studies and background in Law and a great knowledge in the Real Estate area, Ana Constantino started the business. Together with Teresa Mateus, Nuno Constantino and Marco Alexandre, TOPcasas does it best to offer a friendly but highly professional service to all that are looking to buy a house in the Silver Coast Portugal!

In 2007, Richard Williams decided to leave the bank where he worked for 10 years as an account manager, to assume the management of the company, bringing along his experience in Mortgages & Insurance.

Ana Constantino explained “We make a huge investment in advertising our properties, by listing your property with TOPcasas you are exposing it do several different markets and kinds of clients around the world.”

“On top of this our experience made it possible to create a number of good relationship with International estate agents in all continents allowing us to have our products not only in our web resources but in many major offices based in Miami, Toronto, Toquio, Madrid, London, Dublin & many others.”

The Silver Coast is a fertile region slotted between the Atlantic Ocean and the massif that rises in Montejunto and overlooks the entire region in all its extension. This splendid area is a green strip of land sprinkled with white houses, uniting the maritime cost and the countryside in a pleasant climate we wish to visit.

The new TOPcasas property website was developed by Navega Bem – Web Design, specialists in the creation of Real Estate websites and Content Management System Professionals.

Chris Szabo – Creative Director of Navega Bem explained how the site was produced. “The TOPcasas property portal is programmed around the award winning Joomla CMS framework. For this venture we utilized the latest version of Joomla 1.5 and incorporated our proprietary Realty component. With the help of the TOPcasas team we have been able to create a user friendly, search engine friendly website that will produce excellent results in the search engines.”

Anyone looking to buy a property in the Silver Coast through the TOPcasas website will have access to thousands of properties from Cascais up to Fiqueira da Foz. TOPcasas also offer a FREE property find service and take the stress out of buying a villa.

For those who do not live in their property in Portugal full-time, TOPcasas advice is to appoint a property management company to look after the villa or apartment. TOPcasas have a sister company called Black Cove – Silver Coast Property Services Ltd., that will take care of all or some of the following on behalf of the owners:

• Payment of bills on time (electricity, water, telephone, rates, etc);
• Regular visits to the property to air it and to keep it clean;
• Undertaking any necessary minor maintenance work (plumbing, electricity, etc);
• Taking care of the garden;
• Regular cleaning of the swimming pool;
• Preparing the house for arrivals (fresh flowers, food in the refrigerator, etc);
• Advising on any repair works;
• Renting out your villa.

For more information about buying or selling property on the gorgeous Silver Coast of Portugal – visit the TOPcasas website at www.topcasas.co.uk

So why will be 2010 be the year of DIRECT SALES and the INDEPENDENT HOTEL?

First of all this is kind of a contradiction. The reason that 2010 will be the year of the independent hotel is partially to thank to the resurgence of the OTA and Travel Merchant model. The current economic challenges in the market have allowed 3rd party travel agency websites to regain a larger % of online travel distribution.

The OTA distribution channels have made the franchise chain complacent. They easily produce the same number of bookings and revenues or more that the franchise chains. Looking at the paid advertising section of search engines like Google and Yahoo, the strong presence of OTA’s reflects this.

Shopping around on any of the travel agency websites, we have started to notice that more and more hotels listed on the first are independent properties, or belong to local or smaller hotel groups. Something tells us that the global chains and larger hotel groups have been pushing quite persistently over the last few years to bring commission levels down over the last few years that the OTA’s prefer to list properties with which they yield a larger margin.

But also on meta-search sites like Trivago and even Bing Travel independent hotels are starting to floart to the top more and more. On some sites and destinations they even significantly outweigh the number of ‘big brand’ chain properties. Just check TripAdvisor for the top 20 hotels in London, Paris and San Francisco. The independents are starting to rule the charts….

And even when doing a search in Google for Hotel London, Hotels Amsterdam, hotels in New York, etc gives comparable results. Independent hotels seem to dominate the online real estate.

So why does it seem that independent hotels have gained the upper hand? It is quite simple actually. Even though chains and large hotel groups offer many advantages (reduced purchasing cost because of scale etc), they also lack the focus to market a particular property or destination. Too many layers of management and difference of interest and priority between internal departments and management steers the chain in another direction. Their online positioning usually is mainly focused on the brand or flag.

Many corporate rules and guidelines within chains and hotel groups prohibit or withhold individual properties to develop their own direct marketing strategy. After all the chain takes care of the marketing side of the business, right? The lack of decentralization and empowerment of the on property hotel management is a huge handicap for them.

The above is all about commissions and marketing investments and efforts. But in this new age of Web 2.0 (or Travel 2.0) there is another factor we have to take into consideration when it comes to marketing.

• Authentic friendliness of the staff
• Amazing location
• Exceptional personal attention
• Impressive original food
• Exclusive service
• Simplicity, no frills
• Unique design
• Warmth and true hospitality

1. Opensource CMS: For more flexibility in managing the content of your website you should use an opensource content management tool. It will allow you to launch new pages and change structure without depending on your web designer. (Joomla / WordPress / Drupal)
2. Landing Pages: Pick themes, launch a page for every special offer and market segment or search. Think niche marketing and search engine saturation! Cater to each potential market segment on an individual basis. The long tail of travel seo works!
3. Languages: An easy way to expand your reach. What at the main tourist feeder markets for your destinations? Are you missing any languages?
4. Google Local Business Center: A great way to improve your listing and traffic. Powerful marketing tool which is only just starting to show its potential. The implementation of Google Maps Favorite Places gives you an idea where we are heading.
5. Google Webmaster Tools: Register your site map. Ideally you should have an XML sitemap that pushes your menu structure out to the search robot. If you are lucky Google will pick-up your menu structure and show site links below your URL when people look for your hotel specifically.
6. SEO: pick your keywords carefully, in your meta-titles and description focus on search behavior and not on product and brand. Sell what your potential guests are looking for!
7. Click to Call, Chat, Call Back: Be hospitable and available on your hotel website. Assist potential guests to increase the number of bookings. Remember phone conversion is higher than online as it is more personal. So let them call you! You can use a simple service like Skype or look at solution offered by companies like eStara
8. Tourist Guide: Become a travel agent instead of a hotelier. Don’t push your product but sell the destination. Use maps, Google loves this!
9. Events: What is going on in town while your guests are staying with you. Include it on your home page. Make an event section and show it in confirmation emails. No need to do it all by yourself, pull event calendars in through RSS feeds from your local tourist board website or sites like Eventful.com
10. Video: Integrate videos into your website. Shoot your hotel room with your own camera and put the videos on YouTube and list them afterwards on your site. It helps you in 2 ways. We all know pictures say more than a 1000 words. Well videos kind of have a multiplied effect of this. Secondly it is a great SEO move. Make sure you pick your keywords smart in YouTube! Oh yes don’t forget to add the videos to you Google Local Business Center listing.
11. Review Monitoring: Make sure you know what people write about you. You can set-up a control panel for free using RSS feeds from review websites, Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes and Netvibes.
12. Review Response: Thank everyone that write something about your hotel, positive or negative. They are your guests. Engage and show them you care and value their feedback. Keep in mind potential guests will notice that you are involved.
13. Review Stimulation: Email guests after check-out, ask them to write about their experience on review websites like TripAdvisor or TravelPost and you hotels FaceBook profile. This way they help you to spread the word.
14. Review Recycling: Filter out the positive stuff. You can use Delicious and create a feed you can send to FriendFeed, FaceBook and Twitter. Just like the movie companies on their posters, ‘New York Times says: Best Movie of the Year’. Good thing is, you did not write it! This works, we tried it!
15. Blog: Integrate the hotel blog into your hotel website and become a tourism journalist. Write about interesting and original things. Cover events in your city or destination. Please don’t write about your hotel’ it’s usually boring. Except of course if you have something really original will spark interest. But it has to be really really special!
16. Online PR: Those interesting articles you write for your blog can now be placed on tourism news websites with links to your hotel website. There are also many blog syndication pages. It is one of the most effective SEO strategies. Moreover if you started to get recognized of a provider of great content you will be branding your hotel in the strongest possible way.
17. RSS: Use Feedburner to distribute your blog by email and RSS Syndication.
18. Listing Websites: List your hotel on as many free listing websites that allow you to put in a link to your hotel website. Please do not participate in link exchange. Start with WikiTravel, Yelp, VirtualTourist.
19. Web 2.0 BroadCasting Station: Link all of your profiles from social networks, photo and video sharing websites and book marking website to save time. This way you don’t have to post the same thing over and over again. FriendFeed is the mother of all 2.0 websites. It allows you to link up all the others… You should be on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, …
20. Mobile: Start with a simple mobile website so you can be found if people look for your hotel. Have picture and click to call button. Simplicity should do the trick for now.
21. eCRM: Personalized confirmation emails, pr-arrival and after check-out emails work. But again they need to be personalized. Include weather forecast, events during the guest’s stay, restaurant suggestions etc. Step 1 though is making sure your reservations office and front desk is capturing email addresses! Make sure you build a proper DB and develop a plan for implementing a hotel CRM strategy.

Zell am See is one of the most important holiday regions in Austria and one of the most family friendly in the whole of Europe.

Zell am See-Kaprun is one of the most sought after locations for holidays internationally – in both summer and winter.

Globalnet Wolf Hofer have now launched their new accommodation portal for this exclusive region. The site features hundreds of good hotels, villas and apartmemts – all featuring reviews and images with additional luxury category voting by clients.

Additionally, site visitors can find information about the individual towns in the area as well as restaurants, shopping, cafes and a whole lot more.

The portal was developed by Navega Bem – Web Design on Madeira island and is crafted around Joomla 1.5 with the incorporation of K2.

Visit the new Zell am See accommodation portal at: www.zellamsee.at

Easy Holiday Rentals have launched an innovative web site that allows home owners to advertise their homes for rental. The simplicity of the site gives it a competitive advantage over similar offerings around the world.

The website is a listing of private properties. Home owners can register on the site and enter the details of their property, adding images, description and much more. Listings are available FREE of charge for the next 6 months – but there will in the future be a nominal charge to advertise on the site. To feature a property at the top of the listings will also in the future incur a charge.

Easy Holiday Rentals are confident that they can provide a valuable service to homeowners that wish to rent their properties – as well as giving site visitors that prefer not to pay for hotel accommodation an economical alternative.

Visitors to the site can view the listings and if they find a property of interest they contact the property owner directly. Easy Holiday Rentals acts merely as a go-between, bringing home owners and potential home renters – together.

Visit Easy Holiday Rentals here.

Hotel Rocamar is on the sunny south coast of Madeira island perched on a cliff right on the Ocean Front in the fascinating and natural village of Caniço de Baixo. The breathtaking views over the Atlantic contribute to the charm of this wonderful 4 star Madeira hotel.

Hotel Rocamar has now published its new website which is developed around Joomla 1.5 by the CMS specialists Navega Bem – Web Design based in Funchal..

Chris Szabo, MD of Navega Bem explained “the site Hotel Rocamar has been under development for 3 years and for various reasons was often put on hold and then continued. We have very close connections with the hotel and exactly 20 years ago I was the Marketing Director of the company International Leisure SA – which was marketing holiday apartments in this hotel.”

Visit the new website of one of Madeira islands most popular south coast hotels: Hotel Rocamar.

After a 4 year love affair with Joomla! we have given in to temptation and begun romancing Drupal.
We have not by any means stopped loving Joomla – we have merely widened our horizons and now we are having two love affairs instead of one.

So what made us want to scratch the itch and try something different?
We have developed close to 50 Joomla web sites over the last 4 years. Some of them have withered and died, most are still up and running and some of them are award winning sites. Undoubtedly, Joomla! has been our bread and butter and we have many happy clients.
The last 12 months have been quite critical and many companies have opted for their first ever web site and many others realized that a static site was not the way to get a competitive edge.
Choosing a CMS site has been a financially rewarding decision for many of our clients. Our advice was always ‘Go with Joomla!’ – and go with Joomla! they did.

‘Navega Bem – Web Design‘ has grown both in expertise and in size. Subsequently, the type of projects that we develop have also increased in size and we find ourselves being asked to do bigger and more complex projects. It’s this shift in our development diversity that brought us face to face with the seductive Drupal.

Being commissioned to do a large property portal and other similarly complex sites that require granular access control and are forecast to carry heavy traffic – we saw that Drupal was the prefect solution.

So what are we now recommending to our clients?
Surprisingly, it’s not a case of which is better; Drupal or Joomla!  Both open source solutions have distinct advantages and disadvantages, so each and every project is analyzed on its own merit and conclusions are then drawn. We can’t say that one is better than the other. They are both excellent CMS tools and are made for different things. They are both reasons why commercially developed CMS solutions have increasingly more and more limitations.

Joomla is very straight forward and easy to use out of the box solution (the term ‘easy’ being relative).
Drupal can do what Joomla! does – but the learning curve is much steeper. Drupal is however, a web application framework that offers massive extra scalability.

We were initially reluctant to go for Drupal. We did feel a little disloyal to Joomla! But we are now enjoying them both. The fact that Drupal has now won the best open source PHP CMS for the second year in a row – made it all the more sexy.

What are the big boys out there using?
Well, the United Nations website runs on Joomla!  The White House website runs on Drupal.