Hip Holidays needed a complete website facelift to expand their Ibiza business of luxury villa rentals. They asked for a highly customized top-end website design, wanted a CMS system so they could write and maintain all the pages and photos themselves and they wanted a booking management system too. They didn't want to pay a fortune and could it be done in a month please?

A tough order, but we were game for the challenge! First we worked closely with Chamonix-based graphic designer, Jamie Strachan, for the pixel magic. Joomla seemed to fit the bill as a "foundation" for the new site - leveraging this free open source CMS system allowed us to build the bulk of the site (SEO, ability to add/edit pages and photos, etc.) without wasting valuable project budget or calendar time. We chose to integrate the Porte Verte Properties package to provide availability/pricing calendars and to push enquiries directly into the ready-made and powerful bookings management system. And we tied it all together with some Bespoke features written in PHP and a custom Joomla module.

Keeping to our word, the website went live 31 days after the initial work order was approved. Although the client did decide to add a few extras closer to the site release date, the bulk of the work was done on a fixed cost agreement and came in right on budget.

Check it out at http://hipholidaysibiza.com and let us know what you think!

And look for an update to their Chamonix luxury chalet rental business, Hip Chalets, coming very soon...

Out standard €10/month package is everything most of our clients will ever need for their email and website needs. It includes nightly database snapshots to help protect you against accidental loss, excellent personal customer support, and all the geeky software and hardware your business website needs to function properly.

And over the weekend it just got better: we've completed a major infrastructure upgrade of our web and email servers, free of charge for all our current clients.

We've grown a lot recently and we needed something a bit bigger and more powerful. Our new server is running on "cloudlayer computing" which means we can instantly ramp up memory and CPU power as we grow and in times of peak traffic. While our previous server was very reliable (99.9%+ website uptime in 2009), our new server has enhanced performance monitoring and a more solid foundation which we hope will push this even higher.

While Porte Verte is mostly a web development company, hosting is inevitably a large part of the equation for most of our customers. We're happy to have finished this upgrade that will enable us to continue to meet our customers' hosting needs into the long term future. And we're happy to continue offering it at what we think you'll find is a highly competitive and fair price.

Haute Transfer needed some major enhancements to their online booking process, including online payment by credit card. The Porte Verte Transport system was used to link payments directly to their Credit Agricole bank account. The Porte Verte Transport office automation system was also introduced to make all day-to-day tasks easier. Porte Verte was able to rush through the implementation in time for Christmas: it took less than a month between the time the work proposal was accepted and the site went live.

Porte Verte is proud to announce the release of a new website for the European Science Foundation (ESF): EURO-XPRAG (www.euro-xprag.org). We worked with the project leader and their team of scientists to develop a unique look and feel and give them a CMS system where they could log in to edit their own pages. The scientists are happy and we hope partly thanks to our efforts they are well on their way to a big breakthrough!

Mont Blanc Retreats manages more than fifty properties throughout Haute Savoie. Saturday changeovers in February were really at the limit using their previous paper and Excel based systems. From today they have a new weapon: Porte Verte Properties.

Enquiries from the website now go directly into the system, to be easily put on the booking calendar with one click. The system tracks payments due and sends the various customer communication emails automatically: welcome email, overdue payment reminder, after stay questionnaire, etc. Cleaning timetables can be printed with a click of the button. And much more...

Porte Verte is happy welcome geneva-airport-transfers.com (GAT), a Chamonix-based transfer company, as our latest Porte Verte Transport product subscriber. GAT was already happy with their website and booking process, but needed to integrate the Banque Populaire / ATOS payment system so that clients could pay online by credit card. But more importantly they needed a system to help make their daily office lives a bit easier.

Now their drivers can log in remotely to print their own schedules without having to drop by the office. Planning the daily manifest/schedule is just the click of a few buttons. And the system automates nearly everything about their business, saving hours of time each month.

Porte Verte is happy to announce a new website for Alpinetransfers4u.com - a Chamonix-based transfer company. The project was to do a complete graphic design makeover on the previous website. Porte Verte worked with Alpinetransfers4u to plan an effective new site layout to better channel users towards the site's intended goal: filling out a booking form. Early results indicate that online sales have as a result shot through the roof and Porte Verte wishes them continued success through 2010!