Gender, Justice & Security Hub
An accessible online resource to support the fight for gender justice
Project overview
The Gender, Justice and Security Hub is a multi-partner research project from the London School of Economics (LSE), designed to promote and advance gender justice and inclusive peace.
The hub brings together practitioners, governments and international organisations, to advance the the delivery of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 on gender equality; SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions; and the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda by developing an evidence-base around gender justice and inclusive security in conflict-affected societies.
When we started working with the Gender Hub team, they were already one year into this five year project, and needed a website to showcase their ongoing work, to both provide a valuable resource to those working in the field of gender justice, and to inspire others to learn more and get involved. We helped them to create a brand new, highly accessible website that appeals to their global audience around the world.
0.21g
CO2 per page view
100%
Lighthouse Accessibility score
1.9s
Page load time
The success of our project is absolutely down to Wholegrain – their insight, knowledge and approach to the project from start to finish is reflected in the success of our site.
Nicky Armstrong, Communications Manager
Following in-depth discovery with the Gender Hub team, we created a design based around their existing brand guidelines, that would appeal to their existing audience and engage and inspire a new audience of future potential researchers and supporters.
When we started this project, the hub already comprised 32 research projects, under six themes, and had more than 108 people involved, including researchers, project partners, communications, impact and administrative staff and advisory board members. The challenge was to design a site that would be both visually engaging, and intuitive to use, as well as ensuring it meets global accessibility guidelines.
In order to make it easy for those using the website to find the information most relevant to their area of interest, we designed the site in line with the six research themes the Gender Hub covers.
For each area of interest, we created a landing page that outlines the purpose of that theme, with links through to the current research displayed as image blocks, to make it easy to navigate to the relevant work.
Interactive world map
A key feature of the website is the interactive map we developed for the ‘Where we work’ section.
The Hub has seven core countries of focus, and a further 17 across the world, in which they have active projects. This interactive map allows people to click on a location pin, which reveals a pop up box that takes you through to country data for the core countries, and current projects for each country.
From here, advanced search filters allow users to find more specific results, or start a new search, by research theme, topic, and/or country.
Multi-language
The Hub’s core languages are English, Arabic, Kurdish, Spanish, Sinhala and Tamil, so in order to make the website fully accessible, we needed to consider language from the design phase.
Rather than create separate sites for each language, we configured Polylang – a much lighter version of WordPress Multi-language (WPML) – to allow for translations of each page into the local language, first ensuring suitable fonts were available and accounting in the design phase for varying word length in different languages, including right to left for Arabic.
Integrated newsletter
Based on the new website site we also created a custom designed newsletter for Gender hub, adding a call to action to the site for people to sign up to stay up to date with their latest research.
Wholegrain mean it when they say that they use their business as a force for good, they have bought our research to life and made the communication of our work to advance gender, justice and inclusive security so much easier by building such an accessible knowledge platform that will be used to advance change.
