Head In The Game are a football charity focussed on supporting men tackle the stigma of talking about their mental health through structured football sessions across the UK.

THE CHALLENGE
Since starting in 2021, Head In The Game have grown from a one location project in the corner of Kent to a national football organisation with partnerships with Brentford FC, Tottenham Hotspur, Sheffield Uts, Millwall and many other professional football clubs.

At the start of summer 2022, the founding Director asked me to redesign the website which was created through WordPress themes in the past.
As ever – for me, this is not about ‘a better design’ – it was about getting under the skin of current accessibility and user journey issues, and defining better routes into content. If that could lead to increased applications for men to access the programme then this was even better.

Challenge accepted 😃

THE PROCESS
I first looked through the current site, its architecture, and gathered a deeper understanding of the needs and goals of the website with Mark, the Director and his team.
I spent time mapping all of the current issues with the site on Figjam, and sketched some ideas for new layouts and access to content.

One of the first areas I looked at was the structure of content and the unordered style.

• no real order
• no hierarchy
• pages added in random places
• content within some of the pages had no real need to be a page in its own right

As you can see – the menu was also not the best design or layout, pushing the content down the page with both a logo and the name in the header.

After some research and exploration I recommended a new site IA for HITG, which with some additional ideas and input from HITG and the team, we settled on:

Reimagined Navigation & Structure

Creating a whole new IA and structure to the site was important to help to both position great information on various pages, but also to provide simple and easy access for funders and press to the impact section. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly to help possible participants find information about the sessions and to register their interest.

Defining User Journeys

I mapped out the most likely user journeys that we would want or expect users to take on the site. These were at a very high level at this stage, and as we went through the content plan we’d define more intricate journeys and CTAs.

Taking all this into action, I redesigned the site using a block builder system on WordPress, defined a colour brand palette (which was a little in flux before with multiple shades and colours being used across web and social) and setup a simple and clear designs for the site.

A superb service. Huge thanks to Steve who took the time to understand what we needed as a business to make our new site work. The build was expertly handled, whilst giving us the opportunity to input our ideas and vision. Steve is an expert in his field and comes highly recommended.

Mark Pinkney, HITG Founder & Director