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One Drop YoYos

Full-stack development

About the Company

One Drop YoYos is a high-end modern yoyo manufacturer based in Eugene, Oregon. They design and build some of the world's finest aluminum skill toys. Every single yoyo is hand assembled and tested with great attention to detail to deliver the highest quality products.

Objectives

  • Create a new website that reflects their brand identity and make the site more engaging.
  • Deliver a fully Responsive Design to provide greater device accessibility and user experience.
  • Improve SEO and overall site performance
  • Develop an easy to use Content Management System.

Solution

When One Drop YoYos approached me they already had a firmly established brand and customer base. They closely work together with players and friends, do collaborations with other companies like Re-Logic the creators of the Terraria video game, and involve the yoyo community to bring new and exciting projects to life. One Drop's machine shop has even become a "yo-yo destination" over the years. Yo-yo fanatics from all states and different countries visit the business while in Eugene. They have shop tours almost every day. As a visitor you can get an insight about the design and production of yoyos, learn new tricks and hang out with the crew, grab a coffee or have a lunch with them.

They were looking for a simple yet elegant look, just like the designs of their products, and wanted to make sure that visitors could easily find what they are looking for. With the above in mind I wanted to focus the design around people and storytelling. We all know the phrase "images worth more than a thousand words" so I centered the content around pictures to convey the company's spirit and their community engagement. I wanted the home page to reflect this in the best possible way so I decided to go with a full screen image slider and to present the latest pictures from their Instagram feed to encourage social engagement. I used full width image headers throughout most of the pages to achieve the same impression and to create a more appealing user experience. The company has its own team of professional players, they share the company values and socialize with the community. It was important to present them in an interesting and approachable way. To achieve this each sponsored player has its own page with their individual stories and social media links to be able to connect with them.

They didn't just needed a new front-end design. They started producing yoyos as a side project with just one product, so at the time of their establishment a static website with just a few pages was sufficient enough for their needs. As their business steadily grew into a full time yoyo maker business the need for a new site has risen. Over the years with each new line of products, which is now over 40, and all the other content their old site slowly became hard to manage. They needed a simpler and faster way to publish new products, sponsored players, retailers and etc. To resolve this issue I created a CMS with a database and admin panel for them so they can easily update content anytime from any device.