Notice the cool drop shadow effect on some of the boxes and images? That is done completely background-image-free using CSS. Thanks to this article from A List Apart, it was pretty painless to add this cool little effect and still use a minimum amount of images in the layout.

Daughters Emma & Erin Swimming on Vimeo

After six years, Plexus clients will see a new face when they come to our site. Why the delay? You know the story...something about cobblers and shoes. Believe me, we aren't complaining. Too much work is a good problem to have.

A few weeks ago we gathered as a company to kick around some new ideas. I quickly got started on a new look that was more in sync with our logo and collateral redesign (new colors, refined logo, new design elements) done by the brilliant Kim Landrum. Designs have been started before but inevitably the time needed to bring them to completion was devoured by work for our paying clients. Remember the cobblers and shoes I was telling you about?

It wasn�t long before we stopped in our tracks and realized the challenges our clients face when traveling down this road. Building a new identity is daunting. Creating an internet presence that embodied all we are�how do we accomplish such a thing? And how can we make this whole experience better for our clients?

We decided to try something different. Since time is our enemy, maybe we should take an incremental approach to designing our site. What if we created a site that was ever evolving? What if the decisions we made weren�t finite? What if our site was a proving ground for new technologies and creative ideas in flux?

This idea was working.

So here we are, the first draft of the new us. We�ve given ourself a solid foundation and will continue to build, refine and enhance our online presence.

While we have plans for many new features to the site, some that made this first draft are:

• Comprehensive portfolio organized by services and clients
• Staff spaces to that allow you to learn more about the people at Plexus, and that enable us to share technical problems and solutions with the worldwide web development community
• More current information about our expanded set of services
• A site more represenative of our capabilities
• Entire site managed through a user-friendly web interface, encouraging updates and decreasing maintenance overhead.

Features soon to come:

• A multitude of info architecture, design consistency and path enhancements
• Ability to enlarge portfolio images (probably priority number one)
• Easy to understand web site packages.
• Live demos of our content management solutions
• Case studies to give you practical examples of how our products and services solved problems for our customers
• Screencasts of products and content management components in action

We value you and we value your opinions. Please provide them. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our new incarnation and look foward to bowling you over with creative greatness in the days to come.