Guiding Young Minds (GYM)
What's GYM and why did they need a website?
Guiding Young Minds (GYM) is a groundbreaking initiative dedicated to steering young people away from gang culture and towards positive, safe alternatives. The challenge was to design a website that catered to multiple audiences—at-risk youth, parents, schools, law enforcement, and social workers—while maintaining a sense of safety, trust, and empowerment.
As the first and only organization in this space, GYM had no direct competition, making it even more important to create a clear, engaging, and intuitive digital platform. I worked closely with Anton and Barbara, the founders of GYM, to ensure the website’s structure and design met their ambitious vision.
Web Approach
- Developed a structure to guide different audiences to the right areas effortlessly, with custom post types for both the groups of people who would navigate the website and the services they offer, and implemented cross-links throughout the site, ensuring visitors could easily find relevant information.
- Designed a welcoming and modern aesthetic that would resonate with young people, adding a graffity style font, while maintaining credibility for parents and professionals.
- Integrated GYM’s dark purple brand color into the website and introduced lime green as a contrast color, adding vibrancy and energy while maintaining readability and accessibility.
- Added a popup notification on the homepage to promote the organization’s WooCommerce shop, allowing visitors to purchase merchandise and contribute to GYM’s cause.
Results
- The website provides a seamless and intuitive user experience for its diverse audience.
- The e-commerce shop has helped generate funds to expand activities and outreach programs.
- The founders were extremely pleased with the final result, highlighting the attention to detail and care put into the project, giving us the testimonial below
Testimonial
"We just want to say how very impressed we are with Irene and the work she has done for the website. (...) the attention to detail shown has been first class."
Barbara and Anton
GYM Founders