Lluc Bertran

Mountain Guides Platform

The website and management platform for a mountain-guiding business. A trilingual public site, a private dashboard with AI-assisted translation and image processing, and SEO work that substantially increased search visibility.

Status
Completed
Period
Summer 2025 – Present
Context
Real product, built for and used by a mountain-guiding business.
Role
Sole developer. Design, development, infrastructure and SEO.
Area
Software Engineering
Stack
  • Next.js
  • Vercel
  • Cloudinary
  • Google Gemini API
Topics
Web development · Internationalisation · Authentication · SEO · Content management
Links
Home page of the mountain-guiding website

Overview

The client is a team of qualified mountain guides offering hikes, multi-day treks and nature activities in the Catalan Pyrenees. The project is their whole online presence: a public website where visitors discover activities and get in touch, and a private dashboard where the guides manage everything themselves, without depending on a developer for day-to-day changes.

Unlike a personal project, the requirements came from people running a business, and the result is in production.

Public site

The site is built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel. It is fully trilingual (Catalan, Spanish and English, each with its own URLs), and covers the activity catalogue with category, difficulty and price, an agenda of scheduled dates, a blog, and contact.

Management dashboard

The guides run the site from an authenticated dashboard. Activities and blog posts can be created, edited, published or hidden, and their order on the public site is set by dragging them.

Management dashboard listing activities with their translation status per language
The management dashboard (in Catalan, the guides’ working language). Each activity shows its publish state and whether its Catalan, Spanish and English versions are complete.

Two pieces of automation keep that workflow light:

  • AI-assisted translation. When an activity is created or edited, its content is translated automatically into the other two languages with the Google Gemini API, and the dashboard shows the translation status of every language. The guides write once, in their own language.
  • Image processing. Uploaded photos are sent to Cloudinary through its API, compressed and optimised, and served publicly from its CDN, so the guides do not have to prepare images before uploading them.

Architecture and security

There is no separate backend service: the public pages, the dashboard and the server-side routes all live in the same Next.js application. Access control sits in middleware that runs before any protected route. Without a valid session, a request receives neither the private content nor permission to write, so the dashboard and its data stay closed even though they share a deployment with the public site.

SEO

Visibility in search was treated as part of the product:

  • each page has its own metadata and canonical URL, and every language has its own URLs;
  • the site publishes a sitemap and structured data describing the business, its location and the area it covers;
  • robots.txt keeps the dashboard, login and API out of search results while allowing search and AI crawlers to index the public content.
Search Console chart of clicks and impressions rising sharply from late July 2026
Google Search Console, May to October 2026, with the scale removed. Impressions (purple) and clicks (blue) rose sharply from late July, after the SEO work. The decline from September follows the end of the summer season.

Absolute figures are left out on purpose; the shape of the curve is the point. Demand for guided activities is seasonal, so traffic is expected to rise again with the winter season.