The situation
Banadir teaches English online to students spread across several countries and time zones, many of them Arabic and Somali speakers. The school existed. The machinery around it did not.
A prospective student had no way to find out their own level, no way to see which class they belonged in, no clear way to pay, and no place where their lessons and materials lived. Every one of those steps ran through a person, by message, one student at a time. That does not scale, and it leaks students at every handoff.
The real brief: a student should be able to arrive knowing nothing, find their level, pay, and be sitting in the right class, without a human being involved until the teacher says hello.
The student journey we built
- Find your level, free, before paying anything. A self-marking placement test aligned to the CEFR framework, the international standard from A1 to C1. The student answers, the test grades itself, and it returns a level. Nobody is guessing and nobody is waiting on a teacher to mark it.
- Get placed in the right class. The level maps straight to a real course. The school runs eleven of them: A1 through C1, Business English, IELTS preparation, and four separate tracks for children and teenagers.
- Apply, and get a code. The application produces a reference code the student carries with them. We researched seventeen live language school sites while designing this, and not one of them issued an application code. It is a small thing that turns "some payment arrived, from someone" into a payment matched to a named student in seconds.
- Pay, and prove it. A payment intake flow where the student sends proof against their code. No card details ever pass through the school's website.
- Upload the signed paperwork. A document upload pipeline for the forms the school needs signed, instead of chasing photographs of documents through chat.
- Sit the live class. One permanent room per course, one link, the same link every week for teacher and students. No new invitation to lose.
- Catch up if you missed it. Recordings are filed automatically onto the right course's page, so a student in the wrong time zone is not punished for it.
- Ask anything, any hour. An AI assistant trained on the school's own material, not on the general internet, answering questions about levels, courses, fees and how to start.
Twenty pages, one source of truth
The public site is around twenty pages, and the course names, levels and fees on them are not typed twenty times. They come from one place, so when the school changes something it changes once and every page follows. That is the difference between a site the owner can maintain and a site that quietly goes out of date the week after handover.
The search problem nobody had noticed
After launch we searched the school's own name and found Google describing a completely different school: a similarly named institution in Mogadishu. Google had merged two separate organisations into one entity in its own index, and was confidently answering questions about our client with another school's facts.
The fix is not more content or more keywords. It is telling search engines, in machine-readable terms, exactly which organisation this site belongs to: a declared identity for the school, its alternate names in Arabic and Somali, its own contact points, and a link binding the website to that identity. We also collapsed the duplicate address variants down to one canonical home so the site's authority stops being split across versions of itself.
Most agencies would never have looked. It only surfaced because we searched the client the way a student would.
Handover
The school owns everything. It was delivered as one package in one place, not scattered across email and chat: a written handover document covering how every part works, a separate credentials sheet, and a recorded walkthrough of the full student journey on the live system.
We also walked that journey ourselves as a student, clicking every link, and it is how we caught a live class link that had been misconfigured since the day it was built. It looked correct in every listing. It failed the moment a real person clicked it. Nothing is called finished here because it exists in a database; it is called finished when someone has used it.
Where it stands
The school is live at banadirschool.com and the build is closed. A student anywhere in the world can now test themselves, be placed, enrol, pay, attend and catch up without the owner touching a single step.