Safe Woman — a course that fits in your pocket

The challenge

Safe Woman is a free, year-long course, backed by local sponsors and covered by the local and national press. People who hear about it pick up their phone and search the name. What they find has to tell them within seconds what it is, where and when the lesson takes place and how to join — and then, once she is enrolled, serve her every week: the timetable, the staff's notices, the membership card.

A brochure site is read once. A course is used all year, and almost always on a small screen.

And there is one moment when the site can't get it wrong. Enrolment opens at an in-person event: everyone scans a QR code, the form opens on their phone and whoever signs up first gets priority. In the past the places were gone in fifteen minutes.

What we did

We built the site as a web app: screens within thumb's reach for the timetable and venues, notices, booking, the digital membership card, the FAQ and useful phone numbers. It installs to the phone's home screen and opens like an app, and stays readable on a weak connection; on a computer it is an ordinary website. Enrolment starts from the QR code in the room: the form opens straight on the phone and you pick your slot.

Two choices come from real use. The dark theme is the brand's identity, but a black screen can't be read in the sun: so there is also a light theme, a second palette in its own right. And long content doesn't sit in pages you scroll but behind a row, in a panel, so every screen stays short and the phone's «back» button closes the panel instead of leaving the app.

Underneath, the part you don't see: a title and description written for people searching «women's self-defence course in Bergamo», structured data (schema.org) describing the course, a sitemap, robots and an llms.txt so AI assistants also know what it is.

How it gets found now

Enrolment opened on 15 September, which is also the day of the peak: 170 clicks from Google. By the 19th more than 700 women had a confirmed place, and the site held every enrolment without ever crashing.

The numbers below should be read for what they are: almost all searches for the course's name. People who heard about it look it up and the site shows up at the very top, which is a site like this one's first job.

On generic searches — «difesa personale Bergamo», «corso difesa personale femminile Bergamo» — the site has only just started to appear, between the first and second page of Google: that part is built over time.

The result is online: safewoman.it.