News

Create IT develops new portal Visit Cascais

April 23, 2018
Create IT develops new portal for Cascais Tourism Association in partnership with creative agency NOSSA

Visit planner and Instagram integration are some of the greatest features of "Visit Cascais", the new portal developed by Create IT and NOSSA™. Knowing the user during navigation allows contents personalization through an approach that "inspires" him for the next trip to Cascais.

Create IT, a Portuguese company focused on the development of critical, cross-platform, and business support systems, has just announced that the portal developed for the Cascais Tourism Association in partnership with NOSSA™ is already online at https://visitcascais.com. The portal was designed on its SmartPortals platform, based on Umbraco content manager, and is hosted on Microsoft Azure. Umbraco enables simplified and autonomous website content management and Azure allows scalability to meet peak usage needs.

The new portal offers several innovations, has an intuitive layout and a great visual impact, with several features to engage with the user, such as the visit planner and the possibility of creating a digital album with Instagram integration.

The main goal is to show the full potential of Cascais as a tourist destination, especially to foreign visitors, and present Cascais Tourism Association members. As a concept, the portal represents the motivations to visit Cascais according to four vectors: Relax, Activities and Sports, Gastronomy and Culture. With this in mind, contents were classified and are shown according to the relevance for each user. This is possible because during navigation, the content ordering algorithm gets to know the user and makes the experience more personalized and tailored to his preferences.

"Cascais Tourism Association wanted an innovative website that could create buzz and viralize in an organic way", explains Nuno Guerra, CEO of Create IT. "It was also essential that the user could plan his visit to Cascais through the portal resources. With a strong experience and skills in portals development in the tourism area, we were very pleased to be selected for this project and see the satisfaction with the outcome", highlights the CEO.

Create IT worked in close partnership with Cascais Tourism Association, positioning as a consultant and getting involved in all phases of the project. Its responsibilities included:

  • Development of the services used in the portal
  • Backoffice development
  • Content types modeling
  • Implementation of a content ordering algorithm that defines what is presented to each user according to his navigation
  • Instagram integration to create a custom album
  • Support in data analysis (Analytics)

NOSSA™ responsibilities were:

  • Strategic and creative concept
  • UX project and webdesign
  • Front-end programming


With this new portal, Cascais Tourism Association is able to:

  • Have an innovative and appealing portal, focused on mobile devices
  • Provide features that "trap" the user and make him want to navigate and use the portal (such as Instagram integration and visit planner)
  • Provide rich articles that promote a better search engine indexing
  • Bring greater value to its members