Web · NGO
Balanced Life Family
Status
Live
Stack
[ THE THESIS ]
Volunteer-built digital infrastructure for a Ugandan charity NGO has to honor donors, staff, and bandwidth at the same time.
Balanced Life Family Organization needed one site that could feel trustworthy to donors in London and still load respectfully for staff and communities in Uganda. As a volunteer board member and technology lead, I built the architecture to stay static, edge-served, and maintainable, so the NGO gets professional digital infrastructure without operational weight.
Live · volunteer board member + technology lead
SECTION 01 — THE TWO-AUDIENCE PROBLEM
One site. Donors in London. Staff in Kampala. Both need to love it.
A heavy site fails staff and communities in Uganda. A plain site fails institutional donors. The volunteer-built architecture has to serve both audiences from the same URL.
Static everything
Every page is pre-rendered at build time. No SSR round-trip, no database query, no cold start. The server-of-record is Vercel's edge cache.
Serve from the closest edge
A request from Kampala hits an African edge node. A request from London hits a European one. TTFB is low for every visitor, regardless of bandwidth.
Small assets, sharp design
Hero imagery is optimized, fonts are self-hosted and subset, Tailwind purges unused classes. The site looks editorial without the weight.
Maintained through volunteer service
Git-push deploys. Content lives next to the code. A volunteer board member can fix a typo through a PR without calling anyone.
SECTION 02 — ARCHITECTURE
Next.js SSG → Vercel edge cache → every continent, fast
Next.js 16
Tailwind CSS
MDX content
git push
→
Vercel CI
next build · SSG
static HTML + assets
→
Vercel edge nodes
Kampala · London · …
cached HTML served
SECTION 03 — DESIGNED FOR BOTH AUDIENCES
Same URL, same content — very different network realities
TTFB
Donor · London · fibre
edge-cache hit, ~50ms
Staff · Kampala · 3G/4G mobile
edge-cache hit, ~150ms
LCP
Donor · London · fibre
editorial hero image
Staff · Kampala · 3G/4G mobile
same image — compressed + lazy
JS shipped
Donor · London · fibre
minimal · pre-rendered
Staff · Kampala · 3G/4G mobile
minimal · pre-rendered
Data round-trips
Donor · London · fibre
none — static
Staff · Kampala · 3G/4G mobile
none — static
Perception
Donor · London · fibre
professional, trustworthy
Staff · Kampala · 3G/4G mobile
fast, respectful of bandwidth
SECTION 04 — ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS
Three decisions that match the mission
SSG
Pre-render once, serve forever
No server. No database. No cold start. Every page is HTML produced at build time and cached at the edge. The site survives traffic spikes during appeal campaigns with zero operational work.
→ 0 servers to babysit
EDGE
Geographically closest node
Vercel's global edge network means a visitor in Kampala hits a nearby PoP. TTFB stays low on 3G/4G, which is most of the traffic.
→ low TTFB worldwide
MAINTAINABILITY
A volunteer board member can fix a typo
Content lives in MDX alongside the code. Git-push deploys. No CMS contract, no monthly SaaS fee, and no dependency on a paid vendor for small updates.
→ volunteer-operated · 17 years of institution