Love West Side: One front door for Melbourne’s west
Roam built Love West Side to carry one destination brand across six council areas: editorial-led, five palettes, ATDW Products, maps and instant search.
Visit lovewestside.com.au (opens in a new tab)- Client
- Western Melbourne Tourism
- Region
- Victoria
- Edition
- Tourism Edition
- Recognition
- Gold, 2026 Melbourne Design Awards
The challenge
Melbourne’s west had no destination brand of its own. Its tourism story sat scattered across separate council websites with thin Operator data behind it.
That was an odd gap, because the west is not short of things to do. The site’s own pages make the case: Footscray and the Inner West alone is home to more than 130 cultural groups and sits five kilometres from the CBD, “renowned for its cultural diversity and delicious array of cuisines”; St Albans is home to Australia’s largest and longest-running Lunar Festival; Werribee has an open-range zoo half an hour from the city with “one of the world’s largest gorilla exhibits”. What it lacked was one site that held the place together.
Western Melbourne Tourism decided to stop marketing its council areas separately and commit to one destination brand for the whole region, spanning Brimbank, Hobsons Bay, Maribyrnong, Moonee Valley, Melton and Wyndham. One brand across six council areas has practical questions to answer: whose content leads, how each area keeps its identity inside a single brand, who approves what, and how six sets of Products and events become one experience for a traveller who does not care where a council boundary falls.
The brand identity came from an external brand agency. Roam’s job was to build the site around it, and to make a part of Melbourne that barely registered online easy to find and worth the trip.
What we built
Design approach: a brand that moves
Love West Side opens on “See a different side of Melbourne”, followed by the welcome line “Westside. Real. Bold. Alive.” and one sentence of promise: “Global flavours, colourful festivals, nature & wineries. Your adventure starts here.” The site’s signature is its colour system. Each visit is dealt one of five palettes, and a control in the header lets the visitor cycle through the other four. For a region whose defining quality is variety, the design puts that variety in the interface instead of claiming it in the copy.
Below the hero, the six sub-regions get identical treatment, a photograph, a short introduction and a “Discover more” link each, so no part of the west outranks another on the home page. Further down sits the WOW Podcast, “What’s On Westside”, a weekly events catch-up broadcast live on Wyn FM.
Content and structure: six equal sub-regions
The six council areas are presented as six sub-regions, each given a visitor-facing name and its own landing page: Melton & Surrounds, Sunshine & Surrounds, Moonee Valley, Footscray & the Inner West, Williamstown & Hobsons Bay and Werribee & Surrounds. Each landing page has an editorial introduction, tabbed highlights across See & Do, Eat & Drink and Stay, and cards for the neighbourhoods inside it. Footscray & the Inner West, for instance, opens out into Footscray & West Footscray, Yarraville and Seddon; Sunshine & Surrounds into Sunshine, St Albans and Keilor.
Across those regions the content follows how a traveller decides: See & Do (Attractions, Nature & Outdoors, Arts & Culture), Eat & Drink, Stay, What’s On, and a Plan section covering Getting About and a News & Inspiration blog. Self-guided public art trails are published as Products in their own right: StreetWORKS in Footscray, the Werribee Public Art Walking Tour, Creative Brimbank’s public art trail maps and the City of Melton’s public art. Alongside them sit the podcast, an Instagram feed and a monthly newsletter. The footer carries the client’s Acknowledgement of Country.
Platform features
Under the editorial layer sits one platform for all six council areas.
- ATDW Products, synced automatically. Products flow in from the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse carrying the details each Operator supplies, such as address, contacts, booking link, accessibility and facilities, so Western Melbourne Tourism curates them instead of re-typing them. Custom Products, such as the public art trails, sit alongside them.
- Interactive mapping. Product pages carry a Mapbox map with the Product’s pin.
- Instant search. One Algolia-powered search across places and dated events, from a race day at Moonee Valley to a craft festival in Werribee to an Iraqi bakery in St Albans, returning results as the visitor types.
- Events as Products. A race day at Moonee Valley and a craft festival in Werribee are Products like the attractions, so What’s On is a filtered view of one set, not a separate calendar.
- Hosting and security. Hosted on AWS behind Cloudflare’s CDN, Web Application Firewall and DDoS protection.
- Accessibility. A WCAG-aligned build.
The outcome
Six council areas now share one destination site. A Visitor picks the part of the west that interests them and follows a story through to a map pin, a booking link and the Operator’s own booking page.
The site surfaces small, often migrant-owned Operators and community festivals that the fragmented council web presence had buried. On the site today a ghost tour at Altona Homestead and a farmers’ market at Altona Meadows sit as Products beside the Werribee Open Range Zoo, and the Lunar Festival has its place on the St Albans page.
In 2026 Love West Side won Gold in Digital - Travel at the Melbourne Design Awards, leading a category in which sites built by Roam took every award: one Gold and three Silver.
Recognition
- Gold2026 Melbourne Design AwardsDigital - Travel
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