Center of Portugal: a multilingual tourism platform built around structured content

Center of Portugal is not a website that can be treated as a fixed set of pages. It is a living tourism platform: places, routes, articles, campaigns, regions, markets and languages, all changing over time.

Fred’s relationship with the regional tourism board goes back more than ten years. This rebuild was part of that long-running collaboration: a new version of a platform that already had serious editorial weight, growing content, and a team that needed the system to stay usable week after week.

A tourism platform that keeps growing

Center of Portugal promotes Portugal’s central region to international visitors across multiple markets. That means the website has to support more than beautiful destination pages. It needs structured content, multilingual publishing, SEO control, relationships between places and stories, and enough flexibility for seasonal campaigns.

The platform manages more than 1800 articles across five languages, and that number continues to grow every week. Content is not just translated from one master version. Different markets need different editorial priorities, different search intent, and different ways into the same region.

That is where a standard page-based website starts to break down.

Using Webflow for layout, Craft for the real system

The visual direction was created in collaboration with a freelance designer Fred regularly works with. Webflow was used as the design and build environment for the layouts: a fast, visual way to shape the interface, responsive behaviour, and front-end details before moving into production.

But the final site was not built as a Webflow site.

The exported HTML, CSS and JavaScript became the basis for the Craft CMS templates, rebuilt in Twig and connected to Craft’s structured content model. That gave the project the best of both worlds: the speed and clarity of visual front-end composition, with a CMS architecture designed for multilingual, relational, long-term content.

This is exactly where Craft CMS makes sense. Webflow is strong for many marketing sites, but Center of Portugal needed more than visual editing. It needed content relationships, language structure, editorial scale, and a cost model that would remain sensible as the platform kept growing.

Building around relationships, not isolated pages

Tourism content is relational by nature. A route connects to places. A place belongs to a region. An article may support a campaign, a market, a theme, or a seasonal travel idea. The same destination can be relevant in different ways depending on language, audience, and context.

Craft CMS handles that complexity through structured entries, fields, relations, categories, and Twig templates. Instead of treating every page as a separate layout problem, the platform treats content as a system.

That matters for the editorial team. They can publish, update, organise, and optimise content without asking a developer to rebuild pages manually. The system gives them control, but keeps enough structure to protect consistency across a large multilingual site.

A long-term platform, not a one-off launch

The rebuild gave Center of Portugal a faster, more structured, and more maintainable tourism platform. More than 1800 articles are managed across five languages, load times remain under three seconds, and year-on-year analysis showed a 42% increase in qualified visits from target markets.

But the most important result is continuity. The site is not frozen at launch. It keeps supporting new articles, campaigns, market priorities, and editorial decisions.

For a tourism board, that is the real work: not just publishing a new website, but keeping a complex regional platform clear, searchable, and useful over time.

This is the kind of Craft CMS development that starts where simpler website builders stop: structured content, multilingual publishing, complex relationships, and an editorial team that needs the platform to keep working long after the rebuild is finished.