With over 1,000 locations across the world, leading smoothie company Smoothie King required a sleek, modern website to showcase its products and promote its commitment to blending a more nutritious smoothie.

The core content featured on the Smoothie King site includes its menu of products: 75+ unique smoothie blends, ingredients, nutritional enhancers, and supplements. A central challenge on this project was providing powerful tools to help manage the content produced by the quickly-growing company. In the past, whenever an ingredient was changed, it would mean that nutrition information for any affected smoothie would need to be manually updated. We developed custom functionality on top Craft CMS that automatically calculates a smoothie’s nutrition information from its constituent ingredients. Now, what used to take an afternoon of manual content updates can now be accomplished in a few minutes.

The careful management of nutrition data on the back-end also afforded us greater flexibility for the user experience. The “Customizer” tool featured on each smoothie detail page allows a user to build her ideal smoothie by adding ingredients. Nutrition information is dynamically calculated and updated on the page to give the user a more complete picture of her perfect smoothie.

In addition to menu content, the site houses a large variety of unique content pages. From promotional pages to about pages, blog posts, and job openings, the site required a robust solution to present varied content without conforming to using predetermined templates. We developed a series of configurable components that allow the site’s administrators to craft the perfect page layout in support of the content. Over 20 different components are used across the site, including image sliders and video media components, complex layouts for featured content, flexible iconography, and components that pull from the variety content relationships across the site. This “page builder” experience has given the site editors the ability to create unique layouts without requiring additional development hours.

The front-end features complex, layered layouts that perform just as well on mobile as on desktop. Integrated video, slick UI animations, and a thick coat of visual polish helps to set the site apart as a leader in its category. In addition, unique interactive experience like the Smoothie King “Fuel Finder” allow users to find their perfect smoothie by submitting their goals and nutritional preferences.

In addition to the content challenges, a requirement for the new site was that it comply with web accessibility guidelines. By developing the site with accessibility in mind from the ground-up, we were able to far exceed the accessibility rating of the previous site.

The site currently serves around 350,000 pageviews each day, and that level of traffic presents its own set of challenges. We implemented smart caching capabilities into the site, and leverage CDN-served assets to ensure a performant site experience across the board.

The new SmoothieKing.com was an exciting project to work on, with complex challenges, interesting integrations, and an eye on the small details that can often get overlooked. We learned a lot, and believe that the site will be able to keep up with the expanding Smoothie King franchise for many years to come.