Swan Valley: The valley that knows what’s open

Design approach

The Swan Valley identity is confident and a little glamorous: a spaced-capitals wordmark, Quiche Sans for display type, Brandon Grotesque for everything else, and a palette that pairs a deep magenta with bottle green and aqua. The bespoke theme puts those colours to work, so each section changes register as it changes job. Search is flat magenta. Product and blog pages are bottle green, with vine-leaf line art behind the titles, and the same leaf art shows faintly in the pale aqua bands beneath the section heroes. Photography does the rest. The home page opens on a full-bleed hero film with a live weather reading for the valley set inside it, and the section heroes move between aerials of the rows, people at the table and in the vines, and flat colour with line art.

Platform features

• Instant search across the valley. The search page tells the Visitor what it holds (more than 400 Products plus the site’s own pages) and narrows to Eat & Drink, Experiences, Stay or Events as they type.
• A region map, clustered. A Mapbox Product map on the home page gathers the valley’s Products into clusters between The Vines in the north and Midland in the south, with a filter by type and a Perth marker reading 25 km. Every Product page carries its own map.
• What’s Open. A purpose-built filter for the day-tripper’s question. Choose the days of the week, then narrow by meal, by category, by location (Swan Valley or Guildford) and by the small things that decide a day out (dog-friendly, a fireplace, somewhere for kids to play, live music, pick your own), then sort by what’s closest.
• What a Product page carries. Each venue page follows the structure Roam uses for Products across the network: description, opening hours by day, contact details, booking and shop links, an embedded map, Quality Tourism and Sustainable Tourism accreditation, the tours and experiences on offer, and that venue’s upcoming events.
• Events, all year. A chronological grid of upcoming events across the valley, with Entwined in the Swan Valley running as its own hub inside the site, with its own sub-navigation.
• Trip Ideas. Nine themed itineraries, including “Iconic Swan Valley”, “Family Day Out”, the “Fortified Wine Trail” and the “Bush Tucker and Beyond Trail”.
• The practical layer. Downloadable maps and guides, including the Swan Valley Map and Guide, the Guildford Mandoon Visitor Guide and four Guildford Heritage Walk Trails; a Getting Here page covering the car, the Midland line to Guildford station, and the river cruises and coach tours; a Google Translate language selector in the footer; a digital gift card; Instagram and a newsletter.
• AI Discovery, included. As on every Roam site, the valley publishes an llms.txt and serves clean markdown to AI agents, so the destination’s own content is legible to an assistant answering “where should we eat in the Swan Valley?”.

Content and information architecture

The top level is four sections: Eat & Drink, Experience, Stay, Plan. Eat & Drink opens into seven categories, from wineries and distilleries to local produce and online businesses. Experience opens into ten, among them family and wildlife encounters, arts, and health and wellness, with Guildford given its own hub for the heritage walks, the ANZACs Trail of brass poppy plaques and the James Street strip. Stay opens into six. Plan is where the Visitor Centre’s knowledge lives online: Getting Here, Trip Ideas, What’s Open, Maps & Brochures, Weddings & Functions.

An editorial blog (seven scenic spots for lunch, midweek deals, seniors’ savings, unique tours) feeds the home page’s Explore tiles and gives the destination a voice between campaigns. Further down, Get Inspired is the Instagram grid, @theswanvalley. The footer carries the site’s Acknowledgement of Country.