Australia’s Golden Outback: Planning the drive across 54% of WA

54 per cent of Western Australia on one site: four regions, their Operators and a shelf of road trips, in one place to plan the drive.

Visit australiasgoldenoutback.com

Client: Gold Region Tourism Organisation Inc, trading as Australia’s Golden Outback
Region: Western Australia
Edition: Tourism Edition
Recognition: Gold, 2023 Australian Design AwardsGold, 2023 WILD Design AwardsSilver, 2023 Melbourne Design Awards

Australia’s Golden Outback - Home page hero: ‘For The Road Trippers’ in condensed capitals over an aerial of red rocks meeting turquoise surf

The challenge

Australia’s Golden Outback covers 54 per cent of Western Australia. It runs from the red rock of Mount Augustus and the Kennedy Ranges in the north to the white beaches of Esperance and the edge of the Nullarbor in the south, and it holds four regions that share a sky and not much else: the Goldfields and their gold-rush towns, the station country of the Gascoyne Murchison, the Wheatbelt with Wave Rock at its heart, and a south coast of granite headlands and more than 100 islands.

The Gold Region Tourism Organisation, trading as Australia’s Golden Outback, has marketed that territory since 2004 as the recognised marketing organisation for the region under Tourism Western Australia. Its Visitors are not choosing a hotel for a weekend. They are planning a drive. Esperance is more than 700 kilometres from Perth; the Golden Quest Discovery Trail alone is 965 kilometres. Out here the next fuel stop matters as much as the next lookout, and a closed road can reshape a fortnight.

So the website has three jobs at once: make people commit to the drive; show them a region made of four, each with its own towns and seasons; and carry the practical layer an outback trip depends on without burying the inspiration under it. All of it for Operators spread across remote towns and working stations.

Australia’s Golden Outback - Esperance, Fitzgerald Coast, Norseman & Nullarbor region page: coastal headland and white-sand beach — Esperance, Fitzgerald Coast, Norseman & Nullarbor: headland and white sand, the counterweight to the red interior.

What we built

Design approach

The current site leads with the country and a voice to match. The home page opens on an aerial where red rock meets turquoise surf, “For the Road Trippers” at poster scale across it, and the call to action reads “The red earth beckons”. A tall, condensed display face carries every heading in that same register, against a palette taken from the ground itself: rust and burnt orange on charcoal and white, with a torn-paper edge where each photograph meets the page.

Photography does the rest. Lucky Bay, Lake Ballard, Wave Rock, Leonora & Gwalia and Station & Farm Stays are the “Icons of the Outback” on the home page. Before them sits a Mapbox map that colours the four regions and places their towns between Mount Augustus and Esperance, so the scale of the place is the first thing a Visitor takes in. The theme is bespoke to the destination, built on the component library every Roam site shares.

Australia’s Golden Outback home page, captured top to bottom — australiasgoldenoutback.com home page, full length

Platform features

Four region hubs. Discover splits the state-sized region into Esperance, Fitzgerald Coast, Norseman & Nullarbor; Gascoyne Murchison; Kalgoorlie & The Goldfields; and Wheatbelt & Wave Rock. Each hub introduces the place, presents the best of it in tabs (attractions, tours, accommodation, events, eat and drink), then opens out town by town: the Goldfields hub runs from Kalgoorlie-Boulder through Coolgardie & Kambalda, Menzies, Leonora & Gwalia and Laverton. Town pages go finer still: Hyden & Wave Rock carries the rock’s dimensions (15 metres high, 110 metres long) and the four-hour drive from Perth.

Products, kept current at the source. The grids are Products, many of them synced from the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (Melangata’s page is fed by ATDW) and curated into the right hub. Open Melangata Station Stay, near Yalgoo, and the page carries the Operator’s description, facilities, activities, directions, pricing and a link out to the Operator’s own site, all maintained at the source. Content is synced into Roam on a schedule, so the site stays up even if ATDW doesn’t.

Search by type and region. One search covers Stay, See & Do, Eat & Drink, Events and Visitor Centres, then narrows by region, so a stay near Esperance or what’s on in the Goldfields is one filter away.

Road trips as the organising idea. For the Road Trippers gathers the itineraries: three-day runs like the Pioneers Pathway and the Kingsford Smith Mail Run, week-long drives like Road to Esperance and Ocean to Outback, and the nine-to-twelve-day Northern Explorer Wildflower Trail. The Golden Quest Discovery Trail gets its own home, with 25 interpretive sites, a day-by-day itinerary and links to the free app and the guidebook. The Golden Outback Holiday Planner, with its “25 Epic road trips”, sits beside them.

Editorial, social and the glovebox. A Get Inspired blog, an Instagram feed and a newsletter form keep the site alive between campaigns. Plan holds what an outback trip cannot do without: Fuel Stops and Road Closures, Important Travel Tips, Permits & Passes, Visitor Centres and Aboriginal Experiences.

Legible to AI assistants, as standard. The site publishes an llms.txt and markdown versions of its pages, so when a Visitor asks an AI assistant about Wave Rock, the destination’s own content is there to be read. AI Discovery arrived on this site as a platform update, at no extra cost, with nothing for the client to rebuild.

Content and information architecture

Six top-level sections carry the whole region: Discover, See & do, Stay, Events, For the Road Trippers and Plan. Discover is geography; See & do is interest, Nature & Wildlife and Outback Wildflowers among them (this region has a season as well as a map); Plan is the practical layer. A Visitor can enter by place, by interest or by itinerary and arrive at the same Operators.

Australia’s Golden Outback - Search page: aerial of turquoise water above an orange search bar with Product and region filters — Search: an aerial of turquoise water above the orange search bar, with type and region filters.View all 6 images

The outcome

Three programmes recognised the site in 2023: Gold in Traveltech at the WILD Design Awards, Gold in Traveltech at the Australian Design Awards, and Silver in Traveltech at the Melbourne Design Awards.

Those awards recognised the site as it was in 2023; this case study describes the site as it stands in 2026. Since then the site has stayed live and current, with the Holiday Planner on the home page carrying the current year’s edition. Every new feature, patch and upgrade is included for as long as a client is with Roam, which is how a site first recognised in 2023 now publishes an llms.txt for AI assistants.