Introduction

Camping is a popular outdoor activity in Hong Kong. It is also well supported by the Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department (AFCD). A google search for campsites in Hong Kong would usually see their own directory ranked quite highly on the search results. Their site is quite informative with adequate information to get started on planning a camping trip. But frankly, it is outdated and can be much better.

I often find myself needing to look up more information to get the information I need for my trip. That’s where the idea for this project came.

Plan

I wanted to create a one-stop destination of hong kong campsite information source

Target Audience

Anyone who is looking for a campsite in Hong Kong

Website

From my research, there are a few ways to go about making a directory website. The easiest way is to use WordPress and a directory plugin like GeoDirectory. I’ve actually gone with this route for almost a year but found it to be clunky and too costly for a side project. The current site is built on the static site generator framework Eleventy and deployed via Netlify. The free tier is quite generous and should last me a good long while.

Data Enrichment

Campsites from AFCD Amenities from AFCD Elevation from public APIs using coordinates Reviews from Google Maps Weather from Hong Kong Observatory Review Summary, site copy using local LLM models

Features

• Search & Filters
• Campsite comparison tool
• Weather forecast
• Light Pollution Index
• Elevation
• Multilingual
• User reviews
• and more…

Cost Breakdown

Before

WordPress + GeoDirectories + WPML

After

Static site generator using Eleventy framework deployed via Netlify (free tier).

Other Costs

OutScraper

Google Maps data scraping service. I’ve used this for reviews and photo scraping.

Please feel free to browse the site, share any feedback, dole out some criticism. Thanks!