Visit Yarra Valley & Dandenong Ranges: Cellar doors and fern gullies, an hour from Melbourne
Tourism East’s site for five sub-regions an hour from Melbourne: wine country, forest villages and farm gates on one region map, with ATDW Products and instant search.
Visit visityarravalley.com.au (opens in a new tab)- Client
- Tourism East
- Region
- Victoria
- Edition
- Tourism Edition
The challenge
Say “an hour from Melbourne” to a Melburnian and two pictures arrive at once. One is vines in morning mist around Yarra Glen and Coldstream, a cellar door with the fire going. The other is the Dandenongs: mountain ash and tree ferns above Belgrave, Puffing Billy under steam, a village main street in Sassafras or Olinda. Different weather, too: the region’s own Discover page tells Visitors to “be prepared to dress for four seasons in one day”.
Tourism East is the Regional Tourism Organisation and Visitor Economy Partnership for both, and for Nillumbik and Cardinia besides. Its destination brand, Find Your Self, has to hold all of it: wine country, forest villages, makers’ trails, farm gates and river country. Close to sixty towns and villages, each with a page to its name.
Then there is the job the website does that most regions give to a building. The site says it plainly: the region doesn’t have traditional Visitor Centres. It has two community-run centres, a touring map, “many digital kiosks located throughout the region”, and “this website has the most up to date information”. The website carries the visitor-centre job. The same domain also carries kiosk pages and Tourism East’s industry section for the Operators it partners with, in an industry register.
What we built
Design approach: a brochure on cream stock
The Roam theme for Visit Yarra Valley & Dandenong Ranges is built like a cellar-door brochure. Everything sits on a warm cream ground; headings are a dark moss green, and a brighter vine green carries links, pills and buttons. Body copy is light in weight, so the site reads warm. A hand-lettered script is saved for one gesture per page.
Photography and film carry the drama: full-bleed video on the home page, and a landscape at the top of every section, mountain ash from above, cherry blossom against a blue sky. On Tourism East’s industry pages the palette swaps to wine and dried rose, so an Operator always knows which side of the counter they are on.
Content and structure: five regions, one map
Discover is organised the way people plan: by sub-region first, then by town. Yarra Valley, “Food & Wine Country”, runs through Yarra Glen, Coldstream, Gruyere and Healesville. The Dandenongs, “Forests, Gardens & Villages”, takes in Belgrave, Olinda, Sassafras and Gembrook. Nillumbik, “Makers, Trails & Secret Spots”, takes in Eltham, Hurstbridge and St Andrews. Cardinia, “Where the Ranges Meet the Bay”, reaches down to Western Port. Warburton & Yarra Ranges, “River, Forest & Adventure”, covers Warburton, Yarra Junction, Wesburn and Millgrove.
Across that geography sit sixteen See & Do categories, from Wineries and Farm Gate to Wellbeing & Spa and Dog Friendly, and ten kinds of Stay, from caravan and camping to vineyard stays. Fifteen itineraries carry stops that link to their own Product pages; Two Days in the Dandenong Ranges runs through six stops, from Paradise Valley Hotel past Puffing Billy Railway and Ripe Sassafras to the Chelsea Australian Garden at Olinda. What’s On & Deals gives events, the markets calendar and Operator deals one front door. Maps & Trails carries the Walks eGuide, the touring map and the Top Trails, among them the ngurrak barring Dandenong Ranges Art Trail. A Plan blog carries the longer editorial, and the footer carries Tourism East’s Acknowledgement of Country.
Platform features
- A region map on the home page. “Explore our region” is a Mapbox map of the whole destination, every Product clustered by locality and filterable by type.
- ATDW Products, synced automatically. Healesville Sanctuary’s page carries its address, phone, booking link, opening hours, wheelchair access, facilities and a location map, all flowing from the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse, so Tourism East’s team curates the Product instead of re-typing it.
- Instant search with the filters a weekend needs. One search across Products and pages, narrowed by sub-region, by Accessible, Deals, Family Friendly and Pet Friendly, and by category.
- Events as Products. Dated events carry their own pins on the region map and their own Event tab in search.
- AI Discovery, included. visityarravalley.com.au publishes an automatically maintained llms.txt.
- Editorial that knows its soils. The Plan blog’s piece on the Yarra Valley as the place for Pinot explains the region’s two soil types, grey-brown clay loams to the north and red volcanic soils to the south.
The outcome
A Visitor who arrives for pinot finds the fern gullies on the next ridge; one who came for Puffing Billy finds the farm gate and the cellar door on the way home.
For Tourism East the outcome is operational as much as editorial. The public site and the industry section live on one domain, in one theme, from one build, and when ATDW changes or Roam ships a new feature, it arrives with no rebuild to fund.
See Roam with your destination in mind.
Tell us about your destination, and we’ll build your demo around it.
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