Welcome to the all-new 45royale!
After several months and many caffeinated nights, we are excited to finally unveil the completely new 45royale web site! In addition to the updated look and feel, we’ve added many new elements and features that we feel make the site more reflective of who we are as a design firm. It was a challenge to balance our day-to-day client work with our desire to redesign the site, but in order to overhaul each page before the year 2036, we had to treat the new site design like a client project. We knew that if we didn’t give our own site the same dedication and attention that we give our clients, the PSDs we created would remain on the shelf collecting dust, never to be made into beautiful coded pages. Fortunately all of us were able to focus, pull together as a team, and complete an amazing amount of work that turned our vision into reality.
Why the redesign, what was wrong with the old site?
Don’t get us wrong, we were big fans of the old design when it was unveiled in May of 2006. We were still a new design studio, but our work was well-received and garnered web-wide praise for it’s clean and elegant feel. The site was even written up and included in Pepin Press’ Web Design Index 7. However, we feel our site should always be directly reflective of where we are as a company, as designers, as developers, and as people who love the web. And while the old design was certainly “us” in early 2006, much has changed in the past two years. We’ve evolved in every sense of the word and the site needed an update in order to show that growth.
A new “Engine” under the hood
Another big reason for updating the site was our need for a more robust Content Management solution. The old site was powered by WordPress, and while it is a fantastic blogging platform that can be customized to meet most people’s needs, it never felt like it was a flexible CMS for power-users. We needed something that would allow us to add dynamic content at will, wherever and whenever we saw fit, but at the same time support standards compliance and accessibility. We found all of that in Expression Engine. Created by the good folks at Ellis Labs, EE gave us the ability to create and develop as we saw fit. We weren’t bound by the code, it simply helped us achieve the experience we were looking for. Now that’s power!
Let’s get personal
Although we don’t write in our company blog nearly as much as we should, we found that we had a lot of great ideas for articles that never saw the light of day because they didn’t fit “the company blog” mold. What if Matt found a new record and wanted to write an album review? What if Adam wanted to talk about Fantasy Football and how he is constantly frustrated by CBSsportsline.com? Where do you put articles like that? Those type of posts seem more suited for personal sites rather than on a web design company’s blog.
After bouncing around several ideas, we finally came to the conclusion that we needed to make room on the site for individual blogs. 45royale is more than our company, it is our life, and therefore it needs to reflect that. You can now see what we’ve posted to our Flickr accounts, videos we’ve created on Vimeo, what we’re bookmarking on del.icio.us, and what we’re currently listening to on Last.fm. We think the personal areas of the site will not only give us the ability to post more frequently on a wider range of topics, but also give our visitors and potential clients a unique chance to get to know the people behind the scenes.
So what else is new?
What isn’t new is probably the better question! There are definitely too many features to cover in one post, but we wanted to call attention to a few changes.
- Out with the old, in with the new — First off, we’ve removed our old logo from the site and we’ve elected to go with an updated word mark. The old logo matched well with the previous site, but didn’t provide the flexibility we need in other “offline” aspects of our business. We needed branding that could adapt, the logo seemed more like a period piece and not something we could build on for the future.
- Unipos, Breadheads, and Peecols oh my! — You’ll notice there are many new faces around the new site. The old site, while very clean, lacked a few personal, fun touches. Not to mention, we are huge vinyl toy fanatics so we wanted a way to feature some of the toys we have laying around the office.
- Dynamic is king — An important requirement we set for this redesign was making the site more engaging by giving it more dynamic elements. We wanted repeat visitors to find something new every time they came to the site. So in addition to the personal elements mentioned earlier, we setup various elemental rotators, gave the tiny characters the ability to speak their mind, pull in blog header background images from Flickr, and more. Don’t be afraid to refresh a page to see what changes. It’s like Christmas on every page!
And that’s a wrap!
We’re pretty sure that this site will polarize people more than the previous iteration did. And that’s OK. The people that loved the old design might not like the new one, or vice versa. One thing that we’re sure of is our confidence in the fact that the new site better reflects who we are as a company (and as people) at this point in our lives. We’re very excited to begin using our new site and we hope you are too! There are bound to be growing pains, so if you notice any broken links or wonky behavior, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We’d love to hear your opinion of the new design too, so please feel free to leave a comment below!
Take care and happy interwebbing,
The 45royale Crew
I love the new site. It’s bold and absolutely beautiful.
Nice work! You guys must be as short on sleep as I am.
Incredible guys, great job. When I had envisioned the next version of your site it looked nothing like it does now. The design is much more welcoming and unique for a design company, nice job!
Thanks for the input guys, your kind words mean a lot! We’re glad you like the new design and hope that you’ll continue to check it out and contribute on a regular basis.
On a side note, we’re squashing bugs as they come up, but please let us know if you see anything acting a little funny. Thanks again, here’s to the new site!
One of the best sites I’ve seen in a long time. Nice Work.
Crazy awesome redesign, above par design, am i brown nosing too much maybe, but this is the type of site I would like to design for myself if i could ever prioritize my client work in such a way as to have enough time to.
Might have to do what you all did and actually make my site a client job and slip it in! anyway enough about me, this is great guys.. I LOVE the legos and background detail work. always makes for nice exploring.
{star wars legos rule}
Congratulations with your new site :)
A really nice improvement on the previous design if you ask me… the only thing I think that could be improved, is to make the site vertically scalable for people with bad eyesight. The text hides underneath the layer when you resize is ;)
But other then that… love the design, and definately love the use of illustrative backgrounds!
@Joram -
That is definitely something that we are aware of, but figured at least for an initial launch we’d roll with what we had. The site is still very much a work in progress and we’ll be updating the site with various changes to make it even more usable over the next few weeks.
Thanks for your input, glad you like the site!
I love your site. Saw it on CSS Import…. Now I’m just really curious to see what your old one looked like :-) Your blog entry was an interesting read too. The process of redesigning your own site is never easy…. until it clicks. And you certainly clicked. Well done. A most uniquely beautiful and enticing site. I look forward to returning soon.
I like how tasty but clean the redesign feels, great work :D
I absolutely love the redesign guys, keep up the good work.
You bet I like the site :)
It’s less “marketing business”-like, and a lot more inviting to browse around. The colours are fresh, the images on backgrounds like the one in the back of the form are a very nice touch… nothing but improvements on all those fronts if you ask me ;)
I’ve really been considering expression engine for some of my sites. Not my main blog, because it doesn’t really require it, but I have a few sites that get massive traffic. And as nice as Wordpress is, it has a lot of short comings in terms of CPU and customization. My programming friend has suggested that I consider using expression engine for a while.
Yes looks great! On the other hand… I’m just getting into using WP and i was hoping to get your feedback into the difference of using WP verse Drupal, any suggestions to using one over the other?
Thanks for the comment, Don!
In regards to your question about WordPress vs. Drupal, I think it really depends on how you want your site structured. Drupal has always been to me a “nerdy” CMS. By that, I mean that it’s not that easy to pick up if you’re just starting out with dynamic content distribution and databases. I’ve only been involved with a Drupal build once and it was difficult to understand at times. I’ve found WordPress is a little more straight-forward and easier to begin with.
That being said, WordPress is not necessarily optimized to be a Content Management System. There are a lot of things you need to do to wrangle it in to submission. But there are ways for you to query the database and pull out the information you are looking for. In fact, I’ve written a number of WordPress articles about how to extend the functionality of WordPress and get the results you need while still maintaining your site in a dynamic fashion.
We’ve been doing our fair share of WordPress-based sites lately and my love affair with WP has been rekindled somewhat. So much in fact that we’re seriously contemplating a change back from WordPress in a few months as we update things around the site. Expression Engine is great and we’ve used it on a few client projects, but we’re finding it’s just a little too heavy for how we’d like to use it around our site.
Hope that helps!
Really clean design. It’s nice to see a site that doesn’t overwhelm me when I first visit – I can see a nice clear navigation at the top right, the main text column isn’t too wide so text is nice and easy to read. Recent Activity tells me what’s new as a repeat visitor. Just resist the temptation to keep adding sections to the site! Wonderful,
I like the unusual colours, the yellows and greens get on well with each other. I also admire the clear design.
Nice work guys!
this is just Amazing!
Thanks
The Joomla Experts
http://superblog.joomlapraise.com/?templateTheme=theme1
Seems like somebody has stolen design ;)