Case study
Destins de Femmes: a women's rights NGO site, Prix Edgar Faure 2024
The website of a French NGO that carries women's voices: inspiring stories, a YouTube interview series, the founder's biography, the team and the mission. Destins de Femmes won the Prix Edgar Faure 2024.
The situation
A French NGO founded to carry women's voices and promote a positive, humanist feminism needed one place where its stories, its interviews and its mission could be read, watched and acted on.
The constraint
The constraint was editorial, not technical. The site is about people and what happened to them, so the design had to step back: readable long-form text, video that plays where the story is told, and nothing that competes with a face or a sentence. An NGO's credibility is built in the first screen, and it is lost just as fast by a page that looks like a product launch.
It also had to be one language, French, done properly for a French audience, with a contact form that works without running a server, because nobody on an NGO team should be on call for one.
A site like this is judged by two people who never meet: a reader who arrives from a shared link on a phone, and a partner or a jury member who opens it on a laptop to check that the organisation is real. Both need the same things in the first seconds: a name, a face, a purpose, and a way to reach someone.
What I built
A single-page React site, in French, live at destinsdefemmes.com:
- An inspiring-stories section, the heart of the site, laid out for reading rather than skimming.
- A YouTube interview series embedded in the page, so the videos play where the story is told instead of sending the visitor away.
- The founder's biography and the mission showcase, each with its own section and its own rhythm.
- A team gallery.
- A contact form that sends through EmailJS with a toast confirmation, so the NGO receives messages in its inbox without a backend.
- Smooth scrolling between sections, a Bootstrap grid, Firebase hosting.
I delivered it end to end, structure, layout, video integration, form and deployment, with no agency in between. That is how a site this size stays coherent: one person holds the whole picture and every decision is made in front of the content, not in a spec.
The numbers
- 2024Prix Edgar Faure
- 5content sections
- FRone language, done properly
- 0servers to maintain
The Prix Edgar Faure 2024 went to Destins de Femmes. I built the website; the work it recognises is the NGO's. I will not dress that up with traffic or donation figures I do not have, and I have not asked anyone for a quote.
What I would do differently
The site is a React single-page application. For a small team and a launch date, that was the fast and correct choice: one deploy, no server, a form that just works. It has one real cost that I would not accept today: the served HTML holds a title, a description and the script that loads the app, and nothing else. The stories live in JavaScript.
A search engine or a WhatsApp link preview that reads the raw page sees almost none of the content. For a site whose whole purpose is to make stories findable, that is the wrong trade. Today I would build it as a statically exported Next.js site, one real HTML page per section, exactly the way the page you are reading is built.
The rest holds up: the editorial layout, the embedded interviews, the serverless contact form. If the NGO ever wants the move, it is a rebuild of the shell, not of the content.
Stack
- React.js
- EmailJS
- Firebase
- Bootstrap
- React-Toastify
- Smooth-Scroll
See it
Want something like this?
Tell me what you are building, or what you are still doing by hand, and I will tell you how I would approach it. No commitment.