🧭 ReactDevsKE Website Redesign – Why This Change is Necessary

[festus-sulumeti]

📌 Overview

ReactDevsKE has grown into a vibrant, passionate community of React developers across Kenya. As our impact expands — through events, collaborations, mentorships, and open-source initiatives — our digital presence needs to evolve to better serve our mission and showcase our work.

This redesign is not just cosmetic — it’s a strategic transformation aimed at improving communication, engagement, and usability for everyone who interacts with ReactDevsKE online.

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💡 Why We’re Redesigning the Website

1. Outdated Design & User Experience

• The current website does not reflect the energy, creativity, and professionalism of our community.
• Navigation is limited, and content is hard to find or not well-organized.
• It's time to adopt a clean, modern UI/UX approach with responsive design, smooth navigation, and clear content flow.

2. Evolving Community Needs

• Our activities have grown beyond meetups — including partnerships, job boards, blogs, and sponsorship opportunities.
• We need a scalable platform that can accommodate these expanding areas.
• The redesign will allow us to better serve developers, companies, and sponsors alike.

3. Improved Engagement & Outreach

• First impressions matter. A well-crafted homepage with strong calls to action can increase sign-ups, event attendance, and newsletter subscriptions.
• We'll create better entry points to connect with our social channels, GitHub projects, and resources.

4. Centralized Hub for Events, Careers, and Resources

• Developers should be able to:
  • Discover and register for upcoming events
  • View past event highlights
  • Explore job or mentorship opportunities
  • Access curated learning resources and blog posts
• Our new site will make this possible with a modular, content-driven architecture.

5. Attracting Sponsors and Partners

• Potential sponsors need a clear understanding of:
  • Who we are
  • What we do
  • What value they’ll gain from partnering with us
• We’ll introduce a dedicated Sponsorship section with packages, benefits, and a direct call to action for inquiries.

6. Technical Modernization

• We aim to follow best practices in React development:
  • Functional components and hooks
  • Tailwind CSS or styled-components
  • Modern state management (e.g., Zustand or Context API)
  • Routing with React Router
• The site will also be structured for future CMS integration (e.g., Strapi, Sanity) so non-developers can manage content.

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🛠 What’s Coming in the Redesign

Section	Purpose
Homepage	Hero section with mission statement, CTAs, upcoming events, latest blog posts
About Us	Our story, values, vision, team (optional)
Events	Filterable list of past and upcoming events with dedicated event pages
Careers/Opportunities	Job postings, mentorship programs, contact for listings
Sponsorship	Partnership opportunities, tier breakdown, logos of current sponsors
Blog/Resources	Technical articles, tutorials, community stories
Contact/Community	Social links, contact form, FAQ, GitHub links

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🤝 How You Can Get Involved

• 💬 Comment with your feedback or feature suggestions
• 🖼 Share UI/UX inspirations or mockups (Figma/Sketch welcome)
• 🧑‍💻 Contribute code (watch for Issues coming soon!)
• 📝 Help write copy for sections like About Us or Careers
• 📣 Spread the word to grow our contributor base

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🚀 Let’s Build It Together

This redesign is a collaborative effort — we want everyone in the community to have a voice in how we evolve. Whether you’re a designer, developer, writer, or enthusiast, there’s a place for you to contribute.

Together, let’s create a powerful platform that reflects the heart of ReactDevsKE — and one that inspires the next generation of Kenyan React developers.

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🛠 ReactDevsKE Team

[nutcas3]

If not using tanstack just redesign smh

[tigawanna]

💯 Tanstack start is what comes to mind when i hear modern react

[kharioki]

Suggestion: We should draw inspiration from industry-leading React Community Sites

This is a great initiative, I'd love to suggest that we consider aligning the redesign with the high-quality community-centric approach seen in sites like GitNation, React Summit, React Advanced.

These platforms excel in:

• Clean, modern aesthetics that reflect the energy of the React ecosystem
• Intuitive event/community hubs (e.g, they have clear CTAs for tickets, schedules, and speaker highlights).
• Scalable content structures for blogs, sponsors, job opportunities, and resources.
• Strong visual storytelling to showcase community impact.

I hereby propose we:

1. Audit the sites to get some inspiration and compile a mood board or Figma draft, borrowing UI/UX patterns from these sites (focus on navigation, event cards, sponsor sections). We'll need someone with decent experience in Figma to oversee this part.
2. Implement Incremental improvements: We start with a foundational MVP (e.g, homepage + events) and iteratively add sections like careers, mentorship, launchpad, etc.
3. Technical alignment: We should adopt best practices (as much as I hate to, I recommend NextJS because it'll get us up and running quicker)

Evidently, the first order of business should be having a design sprint or joint Figma sessions. Also, time is not on our side here; we cannot take another 3yrs to create a simple site.

[festus-sulumeti]

Hi team,

​Thank you all so much for your great ideas and input so far on the website redesign! We've gotten some fantastic suggestions, and it's clear we're all aligned on building a platform that truly serves the React community in Kenya.

​Next week, we'll be starting work on the project, but the discussion is still wide open. Please continue to share your suggestions on the GitHub discussion board.

Your feedback is always welcome as we work to build a site we can all be proud of.
​ReactDevsKE #OpenSource #CommunityFirst