Kitesurf guide · Mauritius · 2026
Kite in Moris
Design, development and publishing (art direction by Studio Citron Sorbet)
- Next.js 16
- React 19
- Tailwind
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- Vercel
The context
Kite in Moris is the kitesurf guide to Mauritius: where to ride depending on today's wind, with which school, what gear, in which season. I publish it myself from Tamarin. Visitors are kitesurfers on holiday or planning a trip, on their phones, and they speak French, English, German, Spanish or Russian.
The challenge
The previous version ran as a Rails app hosted on Heroku: costly to run (server, database, cache) and loaded with features nobody used (accounts, bookmarks, chat). Everything had to be rebuilt without losing search rankings: every page Google already knew had to stay at the same address.
My answer
- Full rebuild in Next.js 16 with a new art direction, "Alizé", by Studio Citron Sorbet: lagoon, coral, and plenty of air.
- Migration with no SEO loss: all 611 addresses of the original site checked one by one before the switch, then data carried over automatically from the old database.
- Live wind conditions on every spot, with a 7-day forecast and the recommended kite size. A "session of the day" points to the best spot for current conditions, and readings feed wind statistics.
- Tools that answer real questions: which spot for my level, which kite size for my weight, which school (comparison, certified schools), which season, plus a kitesurf glossary.
- Five complete languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Russian), with the tags that tell Google which version to show to whom.
- A blog that writes itself: two AI-generated articles a week, translated into all five languages and published automatically after a review window.
- An admin area to moderate reviews and second-hand gear listings, edit articles and manage partner links.
The result
A fast guide, readable on the beach, now counting 655 pages: 21 spots, 31 schools, 9 shops, tips and around forty articles per language. It is also my testing ground for watersports school websites: the kite size calculator, gear listings and help choosing a course were born here before making their way into the sites I build for schools.
