Ministry of Tourism, Commerce & Industry · Government
timorleste.tl
The official national tourism portal of Timor-Leste — trilingual (EN / Tetun / PT), photo-led, mobile-first, with destination hubs, event schema, and GA4 attribution. Built and operated by OniT for the Ministry of Tourism, Commerce & Industry.
The brief
Timor-Leste needed a single, authoritative tourism portal for the international audience — one that didn't look like a 2010-era government site, one that worked on the phones tourists actually arrive with, and one that the Ministry could keep up to date without an outside agency on retainer. The previous portal predated the modern Tourism Strategy and didn't reflect the visual or editorial standard the Ministry wanted for the country.
What we shipped
Trilingual content
EN / Tetun / PT across every page, with hreflang correctness, locale-specific URLs, and a translation workflow that the Ministry can run without engineering.
Destination hubs
12 destination pages (Atauro, Mt Ramelau, Baucau, Jaco, Maubisse, etc.) with photo-led layouts, things-to-do feeds, and operator referrals.
On the OniT fleet
Hosted on Hetzner behind Cloudflare with security headers, CSP, structured data, llms.txt, sitemap, and daily backups. Same playbook as every fleet site.
Event + tour schema
Event JSON-LD on festivals (Lalehan, Tour de Timor, Dili Marathon), TouristAttraction schema per destination — surfaces correctly in Google rich results.
Operating model
We don't hand the keys over and walk away. timorleste.tl runs on the same Hetzner fleet box as every other OniT property, managed by the same PM2 + nginx + Cloudflare configuration, with daily backups and the same security baseline. Content updates happen through a workflow Ministry staff can drive themselves; structural changes go through OniT with a fixed-scope quote.
What's under the hood
- Tetun MT assists translation pre-fill where machine output is good enough; humans edit before publish.
- Event schema on festivals + sport events ensures Google Event boxes appear for queries like “Dili Marathon dates”.
- Image pipeline serves WebP at the right size and aspect for every viewport, with focal-point cropping driven by editorial metadata.
- GA4 event tracking on outbound clicks (operator referrals, hotel search, booking handoffs) lets the Ministry see which destinations actually convert attention into trip planning.
Why it matters
This is the public face of Timor-Leste tourism. Every prospective visitor — backpacker, diver, conference delegate, regional press — eventually lands here. The standard has to be uncompromising. Trilingual content is not optional. Schema correctness is not optional. Mobile performance on a 3G connection in Bali is not optional. We ship that standard.
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