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