Romea Strata

Romea Strata is an ancient route that once led pilgrims from Central-Eastern Europe on a spiritual journey towards Rome, leaving a tangible legacy in the countries it crossed.

The route begins in the northern regions of the Baltic Sea and traverses 7 states over a total of 4,044 km, organised into 208 stages. In Italy, the path crosses 7 Regions covering 1,400 km, 235 municipalities, 40 UNESCO sites, and 20 Jubilee sites.

With the growth of the project and brand identity, Romea Strata required a new website – a platform with a dual purpose:

• To offer clear and functional navigation for those setting out (from pilgrims and hikers to cycle tourists and horse riders).
• To integrate a corporate/institutional section dedicated to certifications, European projects, and communication with stakeholders and partners.

Timing: 4 months with a planned go-live by April 2025.

To meet the client’s needs, we designed and developed the new website: https://www.romeastrata.org/.

We also handled the SEO setup, which led to rapid and evident improvements in organic visibility, and we support the project with ongoing ADV campaign planning on Meta throughout the year.

Romea Strata positions itself as the “hinge of Europe”: a cultural and spiritual itinerary connecting the Baltic to Rome, featuring multi-language content and significant territorial complexity. The legacy site presented typical issues of projects that have grown organically over time: clunky content management, a need for greater editorial autonomy, and the necessity to reorganise navigation across a broad European structure.

The requirements identified during onboarding defined a clear scope:

• Streamline content uploading and make the team more autonomous regarding text and imagery.
• Give immediate prominence to its nature as a European route across 7 States, correctly managing the complexity of Italy (main route + branches).
• Coherently integrate stages and related content without losing visual identity.
• Address a delicate SEO context: following a previous migration, pages and continuity had been lost.

To support the two target audiences, the solution started with the Information Architecture:

• Main Menu dedicated to those traveling: routes, stages, accommodation, useful materials, credentials/services.
• Secondary Menu (Hamburger Menu) dedicated to the institutional side: European projects, stakeholders/partners, press, and documentation.

These choices kept the “traveller” experience immediate without hiding the corporate framework necessary for the project’s European credibility.

The SEO setup focused on three pillars:

1. SEO Sitemap aligned with real user needs (e.g., clearer distinction between “walking” and “cycling”).
2. Content Hub management (FAQs, guides, downloads) as assets for users and ranking.
3. Migration Risk Mitigation: focus on redirects, recovering lost pages, and continuity of strategic URLs.

On the UI front, the redesign was developed in close collaboration with the client. Key actions included:

• Rationalising the colour palette to reduce visual clutter.
• Greater visual cleanliness and sharper typographic hierarchies (fonts, sizes, readability).

Overhauling key homepage components (Country cards, CTAs, info boxes) for more immediate communication.

The platform was developed using WordPress, selected as the CMS to ensure a balance between technical robustness, ease of content management, and long-term scalability. Given the project’s complexity, the goal was not merely to “redesign the website”, but to build a flexible and sustainable editorial system capable of supporting Romea Strata’s future growth.

The backend architecture was designed to streamline content entry, avoiding rigid solutions or static layouts, while ensuring orderly and consistent management—particularly for the informative, corporate, and service sections.

To ensure flexibility and scalability, we adopted Advanced Custom Fields PRO. This allowed us to define structured custom fields for pages and custom post types, clearly separating content from presentation. This setup guides editors during data entry, significantly reducing errors and inconsistencies.

The result is a website where every page adapts to the content without sacrificing structure, accessibility, or visual identity. 

The combination of WordPress, ACF Pro, and Flexible Content has granted the team full autonomy in daily content management, reduced backend technical complexity, and created a solid, scalable foundation for future developments – supporting SEO and accessibility requirements from the outset.

In this sense, the development choices were not merely technological, but strategic, designed to evolve alongside the Romea Strata project over time.

To support certifications and European communication, the corporate area has been organised into:

• Partners and Stakeholders: providing greater visibility to strategic collaborations (including through mini case studies) and enhancing the network’s value by showcasing logos for “long-tail” partnerships.
• Press: an updatable archive of press releases and articles.
• AERS: a structured section featuring the association’s presentation, downloadable articles of association, scientific committee, research areas, and editorial content.

The results achieved within the project scope were:

Clearer Positioning: The site now strongly communicates the scale of a 7-country European route.

Guided User Experience: A more intuitive journey for travellers with a focus on stages, accommodation, and materials.

Organised Corporate Structure: Functional for stakeholders, certifications, and partners.

Sustainable Content Management: The team now enjoys full editorial autonomy.