CLIENT: Mojo Yogurt
PROJECT: Rich-Featured Flash Website
www.mojoyogurt.com

If I haven’t mentioned it before, let me say it again: I love working with the guys at Blind Society. They have great ideas, gorgeous creative, really understand their clients, and come up with projects that really make me feel satisfied after we get finished. Case in point: Mojo Yogurt.

Mojo Yogurt is a really fun brand. Their positive, upbeat, playful identity demanded an online presence that embodied all those things. At the same time, they have a good deal of important information that they need to make quickly and easily-accessible for users. So we needed to come up with a solution that pushed the limits of fun and playfulness without sacrificing usability.

Blind Society gave me a set of gorgeous site designs and we discussed what all we could do as far as activity on the site. We really wanted to push it, so we ended up with all sorts of fun do-dads on the site: flying UFOs, a scrolling background, cars with heart-shaped exhaust, drips on the subnavigation, hot-air balloons with flags that ripple in the breeze, highly active animations inside the pages, moving clouds, and so on. Try coming back to the site before 9:00am in the morning or after 9:00pm in the evening — the background changes based on time of day. Even with all this, I did a lot of balancing to make sure that there was not too much going on at any one time to ensure that the user’s CPU didn’t get overloaded.

At the same time, we implemented some solid code behind the scenes to make the site really effective for users: I used SWFAddress for deep-linking on the site and Google Maps’ Flash API for the restaurant finder. I built a whole set of custom classes to handle all the form processing on the site. The nutrition area is XML-driven so it’s very easy for Mojo to update the nutritional information of their ice creams. I used Wordpress for their blog (with a nice custom skin that is W3C-compliant ) and then customized their RSS feed so that Flash could pull the newsfeed and media gallery directly from Wordpress. I added some Flash shared objects so that users who kill the music and/or sound won’t have to do it every time they visit the site (the site remembers your preferences). At the end of the day, the site has a TON of stuff going on but it never gets difficult to use, for both the Mojo Yogurt company AND their clients.

Response to the site has been great. Traffic is up, user feedback is great, and we received the Adobe Site of the Day Award on June 16th!