The Taylor Haugen Foundation was created by Brian and Kathy Haugen to honor the memory of their son Taylor, a 15-year-old Niceville High School student who passed away after a traumatic abdominal injury he sustained during a football game in 2008. The foundation exists to provide awareness, education and abdominal injury protection to secondary-aged schools and leagues in contact sports, as well as offering recognition and scholarships to local student athletes.

The Foundation had an existing website, and wanted to pare down, condense, and streamline the existing content while freshening up the design to give it a more engaging and youthful look and feel.

The stated goals of the foundation are to Educate, Inspire, and Protect. This means to EDUCATE players, parents and coaches on the risks associated with abdominal injuries and prevention within contact sports, to provide equipment to PROTECT youth athletes from abdominal injuries, and to INSPIRE future leaders by recognizing and supporting area athletes who best demonstrate a similar balance between academics, athleticism, leadership, community service and Christian faith (all hallmarks of Taylor’s life).

YESS© Program – Youth Equipment for Sports Safety

The goal of the YESS Program is to “Educate students, their parents and the community on the risks associated with abdominal sports injuries and prevention,” “Equip middle and high school students with the highest quality protective sports equipment commonly available only to college and professional athletes” and Promote abdominal protection and safety equipment to all secondary youth athletes, parents, and coaches.”

Through the YESS Program, the Taylor Haugen Foundation helps equip secondary school athletic teams with our 50% matching grant for technologically advanced abdominal safety equipment. The Foundation will work with superintendents, school administrators, and coaches both regional and national schools to equip teams with the appropriate abdominal protective gear for their respective sports.

Desktop Example – Homepage

Tablet and Mobile Examples – T’s Story page and blog post

Wireframes

In working with the foundation to redesign the site, we started by condensing content of the site, which had grown into many sections and unconnected, one-off pages over the years. We restructured the site taxonomy, and then entered a wireframing phase to explore how everything could be organized visually.

Once we had that solidified, we began with the visual design elements and explored a couple of approaches using the homepage as a starting point. There was a large repository of photography from Taylor’s life and high school football career, and we wanted to use as much of that as possible so that the site would memorialize and honor him while simultaneously giving an active, “youth sports” character.