Shipping a Website for a Youth-Led NGO
Hey everyone!
Quick break from the usual AI stuff — I just finished the website build for Ushaqlarimiza Oyredek, a youth-led NGO focused on providing education to underprivileged children. This was my first time shipping something where the users aren't other developers, and it completely changed how I think about the word "ship".
Context: the team behind Oyredek is all students and early-career volunteers. They needed a site that (a) explains what they do, (b) makes it easy for people to donate, and (c) makes it easy for other young people to get involved. Nothing flashy. Nothing that needs a DevOps engineer to maintain.
The first thing that changed for me was the stack choice. My instinct was Next.js with a CMS like Sanity or Contentful. Great for us developers — awful for the content team who would need to keep it updated. I switched to a plain Next.js build with markdown content files and a really simple admin flow. The team members who update the site don't need to learn a CMS; they just edit markdown. It's been working well.
The second thing was performance. A lot of our target audience is on lower-end phones and spotty connections. Every asset on the page has to justify itself. I ended up:
- Using
next/imageaggressively, with propersizeshints - Inlining the logo as SVG
- Cutting third-party JS to zero (no analytics loader, no fonts from Google CDN — nothing that touches a third-party domain on first load)
- Keeping total JS per page under 100KB
The end result loads in under a second on a throttled 3G connection, which is what I wanted.
The third thing was the donation flow. NGO donation flows get abandoned constantly — people click "donate", then they're asked to make an account, then the form is eight fields long, and they bounce. I pushed to keep it a single-screen Stripe checkout with preset amounts and a clear total. No account, no marketing popup. I measured the before-and-after after launch and the completion rate roughly doubled.
The part that surprised me most was how much time I spent on content structure, not code. What programs do we run? Who do we work with? How do we answer "where does my money go"? Those are hard questions for a small org to write out clearly, and the website forced us to answer them. That felt like the most impactful part of the project, honestly — not the code, the clarity.
If you're reading this and looking for a first "real-world" web project: find a small organization that needs a site. You'll learn more about performance, accessibility, and content strategy than any tutorial can teach you.
Until next time!