Southern Route 360 Directory Platform

The Garden Route and Klein Karoo region has hundreds of guest houses, restaurants, activity operators, artisan shops, and service businesses with no central place to find them. Visitors searched through TripAdvisor, Google Maps, fragmented tourism blogs, and word-of-mouth. Local businesses had limited reach beyond their immediate area.

Southern Route 360 was built to be the authoritative local directory for the region, covering the full stretch from Mossel Bay through George, Wilderness, Knysna, and into the Klein Karoo interior.

The platform needed to do two things well. First, give visitors a useful place to discover businesses by category, region, and activity type. Second, give business owners a simple way to manage their own listings without needing a developer.

We built on WordPress with Divi and a custom listing plugin architecture. Business owners register and submit their listing through a public-facing form. The listing goes into a moderation queue. Approved listings go live with a full profile: description, contact details, gallery, location map, and category tags.

Featured placements are managed by the site admin. Seasonal events have their own listing type with date and time fields. Region and category filters make the directory browsable without search. The backend is intentionally simple: a small admin team can run the entire platform in a few hours per week.

The site launched with 120 verified business listings across eight regional categories. Within four months, the listing count had grown to 240 as word spread through local business associations and tourism networks.

For businesses that had no digital presence beyond a Google Maps pin, a Southern Route 360 listing became their first searchable web presence. For the region as a whole, it became a reference point that local businesses could link to and recommend to visitors.