The making of An Independent Swiss Travel Guide Built on Divi 5

Swiss Mounts is an independent guide to Switzerland's mountains. We built it on WordPress with Divi 5 — destinations, events, webcams, six languages. See how.

Client: Swiss Mounts
Built with: WordPress, Divi 5, Divi 5 Child Theme, Custom WordPress Plugin, TranslatePress, Google Site Kit

Start a project like this

An Independent Swiss Travel Guide Built on Divi 5 — the delivered interface

Challenges

A guide that aims to cover every Swiss mountain destination cannot be hand-built page by page, so the site had to be modelled as structured content first — regions, categories, events, hotels, railways — and laid out once in Divi 5 templates, so growth means adding entries rather than designing pages
Divi 5 is a rebuild of the builder rather than an update, which meant working with its new theme-builder and module system from the start — a child theme and a custom plugin for the content types, rather than leaning on the page-builder shortcodes and third-party modules the Divi 4 ecosystem depended on
The audience is international, so the site had to serve six languages with correct hreflang from a single WordPress installation while keeping webcams, weather and events — content that changes daily — accurate in every one of them

Solution

Swiss Mounts is an independent travel guide to Switzerland's mountains — not run by Switzerland Tourism or any railway company — built to replace the dozens of sites a visitor otherwise has to cross-reference: ski resorts, scenic railways, cable cars, hotels, restaurants, webcams, weather, tickets and what's on. The brief was a content site that could grow to hundreds of destinations and be edited by a small team without a developer. We built it on WordPress with Divi 5, the rebuilt version of the Divi builder, using a child theme and theme-builder templates so that every destination, hotel, railway and event page is laid out once and populated from structured data. A custom core plugin registers the content types — destinations grouped by region, mountain categories with counts, events with dates and countdowns, hotels with star ratings, railways with routes — and the templates render them consistently across the site. Webcam and weather hubs are organised by region and destination, embedded Google Maps place each viewpoint, and TranslatePress serves the whole site in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese for the international audience the guide is written for. A partner programme for hotels, restaurants and tourism organisations gives the site its commercial route.

Services provided

Design

The design stays out of the way of the Alps. Pages open on full-bleed landscape photography with a dark gradient for legibility, and the interface beneath is white with a warm cream for the events and category sections. The brand colours come from the Swiss flag and the sky: a signal red for the primary buttons and the section kickers — the one hot colour, and the one you reach for on a page of snow — a deep navy for every heading and the feature cards, and a clearer Alpine blue for links and secondary actions. Oswald, a condensed sans, sets the headings in tall uppercase with the authority of a trail signpost, while Poppins carries the body copy, cards and buttons with a rounder, friendlier voice for the long practical text a trip planner reads. Cards are square-cornered with a hairline border and numbered kickers — 01, 02, 03 — so regional listings scan like an index, and buttons are near-square at a 2px radius, which keeps the interface crisp against soft snow and sky.

Colors

#C63828
#123A6B
#1863DC
#F5F1E9
#FFFFFF

Typeface

Headings
Oswald
Every heading, section title and card label in uppercase, from the hero line down to the numbered kickers. A condensed grotesque with the proportions of alpine signage, so the site reads as a guide rather than a brochure.
Body copy and buttons
Poppins
Regular and Medium weights on descriptions, event details, hotel cards and every button. A geometric sans with open, friendly forms that stays readable through long destination guides in six languages.

What we built

Built on Divi 5

The site runs on Divi 5 with a child theme — the rebuilt builder's theme-builder templates for the header, footer and every content type, so a new destination or hotel is a form to fill in, not a page to design, and the layout stays identical across hundreds of entries.

Structured Content, Not Pages

A custom core plugin registers destinations, events, hotels, railways and experiences as their own post types with fields for region, category, dates, star rating and route — the data that drives the counts, filters and listings everywhere else on the site.

Destinations by Region, Mountains by Category

Six regions — Bernese Oberland, Central Switzerland, Eastern Switzerland, Graubünden, Valais, Zurich and the north — alongside mountain categories such as Panoramic Peaks, Glacier and Snow, Family Mountains and Alpine Lakes with live destination counts, so a visitor can browse by map or by the kind of day they want.

What's On With Countdowns

An events hub with each event's dates, category, venue and official link, a starts-in countdown on every card, and filters by category, destination, region and month — a listing the team updates by adding an event, not by editing a page.

Webcams and Weather Hubs

Live mountain webcams and weather forecasts organised by region and destination — nine in Central Switzerland alone — so a visitor checks visibility and snow before booking a railway or a day on the slopes.

Destination Pages That Earn the Visit

Each destination page carries an about section, summer and winter guides, why-visit reasoning, viewpoints with embedded Google Maps, and credited photography from the tourism boards — long-form pages built for the searches a trip planner actually makes.

Hotels, Restaurants and Railways

Selected hotels with star ratings and locations, restaurants with a view, and the iconic journeys — Gornergrat, Titlis Rotair, the Golden Round Trip — each as its own listing, so the guide covers the whole trip rather than just the mountain.

Six Languages From One Site

TranslatePress serves English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese with correct hreflang tags, so the same structured content reaches the international visitors the guide is written for without six separate installations.

Travel Essentials and the Seasons

A six-step plan-check-live-taste-stay-move strip linking tickets and passes, weather, webcams, dining, hotels and getting around, plus a four-season section that answers the question every first-time visitor asks: when should I go.

Partner With Swiss Mounts

A partner programme page for hotels, restaurants, destinations and experience providers who want to be listed — the site's commercial route, kept clearly separate from the independent editorial so the recommendations stay credible.