YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS WIN TOP SCOTTISH TOURISM

Our client Raphael Métayer and Carina Neubert Favero from St Andrews has beaten off stiff competition from other travel and tourism businesses across Scotland to win a top tourism award at a ceremony in Glasgow on Wednesday 26 May 10.

Raphael Métayer and Carina Neubert Favero, joint founders of St Andrews Golf Experience, have won the Moffat Award for best Scottish tourism business with outstanding economic and community impact, and a £1500 cash prize.  An outdoor experience company, called Blown Away, specialising in land and surf activities also based in St Andrews won the award for excellent customer service, and the founder of The Foodie Company Ltd in Edinburgh won the award for growth and development.

The Moffat Awards were launched in July 2007 by The Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT) thanks to generous support from The Moffat Charitable Trust. The Awards recognise outstanding young business entrepreneurs who are demonstrating best practice, excellent customer service and positive economic and community impact in the Scottish travel and tourism industry.

French born Raphael Métayer (31) founded St Andrews Golf Experience with his Brazilian partner, Carina Neubert Favero (23) in 2008. Speaking five languages between them, they identified a gap for a multi-lingual travel operator which was able to offer golfing holidays in Scotland to French and German speaking golf enthusiasts.  In 2008 they approached PSYBT and were granted start-up funding which enabled them to develop a website and start trading.  Since then the business has expanded rapidly. As well as offering bespoke packages combining golfing holidays with English speaking lessons, they are also organising packages and holiday bookings to golfing destinations throughout the UK.

 

JSthumbs is currently a module for Joomla to work in association with the popular social networking component - JomSocial.

JSthumbs comes fully loaded with a wide array of mind blowing features including: 

 

Current Development

JSthumbs is currently being redeveloped to include an administrative interface for creating your mdoule and or plugin specific configurations.  The system will have the ability to cope with many different configurations, which you, as the website administrator, can publish within an article using the plugin and any module position using the module.

 

JSthumbs Road Map

It is envisaged that JSthumbs shall continue to be developed and future plans and impolementations include, but not limited to:

• Template editing manager.
• CSS editing manager.
• Integration into other third party softwares including Community Builder.
• Session based online status.
• Ability to define your own MySQL query, with examples.
• Unlimited configurations.
• complete control.
• Full compatibility with other JavaScript libraries.

 

JSthumbs Support

We offer commercial support for JSthumbs, which includes a support forum, live support (when online), contact form and our email address, it is best of course to always check the forum first in the event that the issue has already been resolved and in most cases and update will always be provided.

Our software subscriptions cover all our software and those luckily enough to be in receipt of a subscription can download all availbale software for a cheap old price of only £20.00 GBP (+ VAT if in the UK).  These subscriptions allow us to both provide support for the software and continually update the software on a regular basis or when the system requires it; security is of utnost importance to us so security and other additional features will be added and supported on a regular basis.

 

Read more about JSthumbs

SmoothGallery is our image gallery module for Joomla.  SmoothGallery enables users to create either a single image gallery or a set of up to 10 image galleries using the Jon Design's SmoothGallery.  

Our current SmoothGallery module comes packed with features including:

• Single gallery
• Multiple (up to 10) gallery sets
• Unlimited gallery modules
• Mootools powered Ajax system
• Unlimited images per gallery
• History manager
• Autocreate thumbnails
• Thumbnail cache system
• Timed slideshow
• Forward and previous arrows for cycling through the images.
• An much, much more!

 

What's coming in version 3.0

Our SmoothGallery module is currently being updated to include a new component which will enable administrators to create unlimited gallery sets by categorisation, upload images directly from the administrative interface and automatically resize and crop images depending on the configuration set by the administrator.

The new component, module and plugin are currently in development and will boast the following features on release:

• Administration interface
• CSS editing manager
• Administrative configuration for resizing and uploading images
• categorised image sets
• Ability to add image titles
• Ability to add image descriptions
• Set the description to either show or hide
• Set description area to slide or fade

 

Read more about SmoothGallery

We have been expanding rapidly over the past 12 months and have now moved our entire operation into a new office space within our hometown Lochgelly, Fife. 

On reflection we are very proud to be able to provide such great services to a vast customer base which extends to each corner of the world including Africa, Austrailia, America and Spain to name but a few. 

Our customers are very important to us and we will endeavour to continually build strong long term relationships with them like we have done for over 7 years.

 

Our New Team

Our new team members come with many years of experience ranging from search engine marketing and optimisation, to design and web development.

Our plan of action is to ensure our team are continually updated with the latest trends and are fully qualified to industry standards, i'm sure the company along with our staff shall be Google Certified soon.