Visit Mudgee Region: Slow travel, found fast

Design approach

The brand leads. The home page opens on a full-width video, then the Rest Rebate banner, then the statement “Mudgee Region. Small Region. Big Fun.” The main menu is plain: The Region, Places to Stay, Where to Eat & Drink, Things To Do and Plan, with Rest Rebate, What’s On and the Online Shop alongside. The region’s own voice carries into the structure: the home-page inspiration row is “A Little Inspo”, the footer introduces the Blog as “Small Talk”, and the categories that refuse to fit a box get their own, “Stay... a little different” and “Do... a little different”. The theme is bespoke to the region, built on the component library every Roam site shares.

Platform features

Products that stay current. Operator Products sync from the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse, so a cellar door’s hours, facilities, gallery and contact details on visitmudgeeregion.com.au are the Operator’s own, kept current without the tourism team re-typing them. Each Product page carries a photo gallery, opening hours, facilities, a directions link and structured data, so search engines and AI assistants can read it as easily as people do. Cellar Doors, Breweries & Distilleries and Glamping are grids of those Products.

Instant search. Search sits in the main menu on every page and on a page of its own, on Algolia: typo-tolerant results as the Visitor types, across Products and pages.

Maps and directions. Every Product links out to driving directions, and the Maps section collects the printable maps and self-guided walks: the Mudgee Region Map, the Mudgee Town Map, the Gulgong Symbol Trail, the Rylstone Historical Walk and the Kandos Town Walk, for Visitors who prefer paper.

Itineraries. The itinerary tool is where the slow-travel idea becomes a plan. “3 Days to Turn Up the Heat” is date-night Mudgee: a farm stay, e-bikes, a long lunch, two cellar doors and a cheesemaker, each stop a Product card, under a suggested stay of three nights, arrive Friday and depart Monday, with a Driving Directions button for the route. The same tool runs the family three-dayer, “Round Up the Crew” for groups and the Mudgee Sculpture Walk, every sculpture a stop.

Campaigns, deals and stories. The region’s Rest Rebate (“Stay Friday and Saturday night and Sunday night is on us”) has its own campaign page, a banner under the home-page video, and its offers on the Deals page alongside the Operators’ other deals. The Blog, introduced in the footer as Small Talk, is a growing library of stories, and the town hubs carry the portraits: Gulgong, the Ten Dollar Town of narrow laneways, and Kandos, once proudly called “the town that built Sydney”.

Found by AI, as standard. Like every Roam site, visitmudgeeregion.com.au has an llms.txt file that Roam generates and maintains: a plain-text guide to the region and its Products for AI assistants planning a Mudgee weekend. AI Discovery is live on every Roam site and included.

Content and information architecture

Three layers do the organising. The category layer is the Places to Stay, Where to Eat & Drink and Things To Do structure a weekend planner expects, with sub-categories that reflect how the region sells: Cellar Doors first under Where to Eat & Drink, and a Great Outdoors hub that gives The Drip, Ganguddy-Dunns Swamp, Wollemi National Park, Windamere Dam and Frog Rock pages of their own. The town layer gives Mudgee, Gulgong and Rylstone & Kandos a hub each, three hubs for four towns, with their own places to stay, eat and drink, and things to do, plus a villages page that runs from the Capertee Valley to Sofala. The planning layer holds Getting Here (the Sydney drive, “around 3.5 hours” through the Blue Mountains), the Maps section, visitor services down to EV charging and dump points, Weddings & Events, and the Mudgee Region Magazine.