Pizza Hut ‘Create your own’

Pizza Hut wanted a new website that would get across what it’s really like to manage one of their restaurants. A key element of the brief was to portray the renowned fun and friendly culture found in their dine-in and home delivery restaurants.

We set about doing just that – crafting a colourful Flash website bursting with animation and unique features, such as a ‘Pizza Patrol’ game and video profiles of existing managers. The theme for the website was ‘Create your own’, playing on the fact that Pizza Hut managers receive all the training and support they need to essentially run their own small business and implement their own ideas.

The design, by Ken (AD) and Craig, was based around the idea of painting and drawing, using a paint palette as a menu device and introducing lots of additional ‘arty’ features such as the opportunity to make your own e-cards using text, doodles and photos (which also serves to attract more visits). In fact, visitors can even scribble on the pages using the pens and pencils provided. We also wanted to make the site easy to understand and navigate, presenting the information in bite-sized nuggets in a friendly and engaging tone. We shot video interviews with existing managers to give some first hand testimonials.

I wrote most of the code for the site, game and interactive features in ActionScript 2 and built the entire site along with Craig. The addictive game has proved to be a very good source of referrals and at last count had around 10,000 high score entries. Don’t blame me if you lose a few hours ‘checking it out’ though .