GardaDay
Lake Garda events in one place, designed and built end to end.900+ events across 76 towns, 17 of them on live automated feeds.
900+
events aggregated since launch
76
towns covered, 17 on live automated feeds
5.2K
Google Search clicks in the first 3 months
108K
Google impressions in the first 3 months
- Role
- Solo designer and developer
- Stack
- Next.js, TypeScript, Postgres, Claude Code
- Live
- gardaday.com
The problem
Lake Garda hosts thousands of events a year, scattered across municipal sites, PDFs, printed flyers and Facebook posts.
A tourist walking down the street has no single place to see what is on nearby.
The project started as a favor for a friend and grew into a product.
The calls
Automate the feeds
A scraping pipeline pulls municipal RSS feeds into Postgres and normalizes every event into one schema.
Claude parses odd formats, flags duplicates and runs unattended.
That covers the 17 towns with a clean feed.
Accept submissions
It does not cover a town whose only listing is a Facebook post, or an organizer who wants to add their own festival.
So GardaDay takes submissions too: trusted partners publish instantly, everyone else waits for one-click approval in an admin queue.
Day, Town, Category
A flat list breaks down at this scale.
Browsing runs on three axes instead, so it stays fast however many events pile up.
Mobile first
It is built mobile-first for someone scanning on the street, not sitting at a desk.
One page per event
Each event has its own page with the poster, date and place, with sharing on WhatsApp and add to calendar.
Built for search
Pages such as Events in Desenzano and weekly markets mean the information architecture doubles as the SEO strategy.
Every page has a plain-text version from the same data, so AI agents can read what is on without parsing the interface.
Results
- 900+ events aggregated since launch, 76 towns covered, 17 towns on live automated feeds
- 5.2K Google Search clicks and 108K impressions in the first 3 months, about 1.7K clicks a month (Google Search Console)
- Live at gardaday.com and expanding to the Franciacorta area
- Monetized with display ads and travel affiliate links
What I learned
Product design today is not just interfaces.
Sourcing and structuring the data matters as much as any screen.
GardaDay is the project where I found the problem, built the product and shipped it myself.
