A lot of things can go wrong when you change most of the URLs on a website with thousands or millions of pages. But this is the story of how something went a little too "right", and how it was fixed by doing something a little bit "wrong".

The Relaunch Timeline

On February, 28 2012 FreeShipping.org relaunched with a new design and updated site architecture.The site's management and developers were well-versed in on-site SEO issues and handled the relaunch in what many SEOs might consider "textbook" fashion…

What is it that makes us loyal fans of the websites and apps we love? When we sat down to answer this question for ourselves, we found that the websites and apps we truly love have one thing in common: soul. They’re humanized. They have emotional intelligence designed into the user experience. And this emotional intelligence is crafted through thoughtful interaction design and feedback mechanisms built into the website…

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, you must have spent the last month in a cave. Pinterest is the latest big thing to take the social media world by storm, collecting over 13 million users in just 10 months.

With a simple interface, Pinterest allows users to ‘pin’ interesting images or videos you find on the web straight onto ‘pin-boards’. The social element comes from being able to follow other pinners, and comment on their pins, and ‘re-pin’ their pins onto your own boards…

Stock leaf textures could be very useful to have on hand if your design is nature-related. Green is perfect for creating calming and relaxing effects, and it can bring a comfortable experience to visitors of your website.

Proper use of these high-resolution textures can make your artwork or web design look more natural and realistic.

While most textures in this collection are green, there are also yellow, red, orange, and purple leaves that can be indispensable for indication of seasons or adding bright colors to your design…

In the following new Adobe Illustrator tutorial you will learn how to create a detailed restaurant specials style chalkboard. We’ll start with the Rectangle Tool and some simple vector shape building techniques. Once you have your starting shapes you can continue and add the colors. We’ll use multiple fills and strokes along with a bunch of new effects and some simple blending techniques…

We are very happy to present a sample chapter from the upcoming printed Smashing Book #3, written by Aarron Walter. In this chapter, Aarron explains how sharing our personalities can help us create lasting relationships with users, and how it can improve the bottom line of our business. The sample is also available for free download in PDF, EPUB and MobiPocket…

We’re kicking off the award season in style here at Branded3 with a prestigious Insider Yorkshire Digital and Technology Award nomination for our talented web design team.

We’ve had the pleasure of working on some great projects in the last year, and our design team have had the chance to truly showcase their creative talent, and we’re thrilled that this has been recognised.

Our designers have been the brains behind some of our most innovative work to date, not just concentrating on the aesthetics, but piecing together immersive user journeys and memorable user experiences too…

When users land on your website, they typically read the content available. Then, the next thing that they will do is to try and familiarize themselves with your website. Most of the time this involves looking for navigation.

In this article, I’ll be analyzing the navigation elements of a particular category of websites, i.e. portfolios. Why portfolios, you ask? Because they represent an interesting blend of creativity and development techniques…

Only once in the history of Photoshop has Adobe released a free public beta, until now. Photoshop CS6 Beta is now available for free download from Adobe, for a limited time (the beta will eventually expire, though at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a set date for that to happen).

This is a beta release, and while Adobe says they’ve done thorough testing, there are bound to still be some bugs…

Every year designers are pushing the boundaries of what WordPress can do. 2012 is no different. In just a few short months we have seen a large increase in the number of premium WordPress themes being released, and the bar is certainly being raised with the new additions to the ranks.

It’s encouraging to see so many designers making their themes responsive so that their themes look great on desktops, tablets and mobile devices…

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…

Topics:

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If you’re looking for some great ways to improve your WordPress workflow, read on for a massive collection of free themes, plugins, tools and tutorials. These resources were all linked via the Smashing Magazine Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and other social-media streams around the Web.

These awesome resources have now been organized and consolidated for easy reference to help you get the most out of the world’s #1 publishing platform…

And here’s another great freebie for all WDD readers.

This one was designed by Carlos Viloria and it’s a very attractive business card template with a retro style. It has the perfect balance between elegance and creativity with a modern twist.

The files are provided as two separate PSD files and can be used for both personal and commercial uses.

You can find more great free and premium files at CarlosViloria…

When I was with a former employer there were rumors of upcoming layoffs (obviously the rumors ended up being true or I wouldn’t be referring to it as a FORMER employer). The company denied the rumors, which sent employees a message to be nervous. Sure enough, layoffs started. First it was some forced retirements. Then the sales force got hit hard. Naturally, the creative department, which was one of the largest of any American company, started suffering odd hits among the staff…

Today I would like to share the design process of an ecommerce theme that I recently designed. Shopdock is an Ajax ecommerce theme where the user can quickly add/remove items to the cart with a single click. It is actually inspired by one of my sites, IconDock. The design process was quite challenging to make [...]

Advertise here with BSA

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Can you teach an old spider new tricks? Could better understanding alien superbugs cure diseases on Earth? These are the questions that will be asked by the two winning experiments of YouTube Space Lab, the science competition that challenged students from 14 to 18 years old to design a science experiment that could be performed in space. Your votes and our expert judges chose the winners from thousands of entries from around the world…

This is a different take on Responsive Web design. This article discusses how we can better embrace what the Web is about by ignoring the big elephant in the room; that is, how we can rely on media queries and breakpoints without any concern for devices.

The Challenge

Let’s start our journey by looking at these online tools:

• Responsive Design Testing
• Responsive…

When a lot of designers and creative types think about photo editing, they think Photoshop. But the truth is that Photoshop can be way over-powered for many types of photo editing. And all those options can lead to creative overload, making it impossible to get your work done in a timely manner.

That doesn’t mean you don’t need a program that’s incredibly powerful, though…

First a question (or perhaps a Freudian jab at your subconscious): What does this shape represent?

Could it be a trowel, a duck, an ornamental motif, or a seed-pod? I know, Aladdin’s Lamp! What if I told you it was an alphabetic character? What alphabet would you assign to it? Cham? Telugu? Perhaps it has the cursive quality of South Asian letterforms, created on bamboo strips (or palm leaves) and written with the pen held in one’s fist… doesn’t it?

It has been said that “we read best what we read most”…

Top Cashback made number five in The Sunday Times “FastTrack 100.”

One of our clients has made number five in The Sunday Times “Fast Track 100”—a ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the UK. This insightful interview with Top Cashback describes how we helped it to grow its business.

Top Cashback grew from sales of just £600,000 in 2008 to £15,500,000 in 2011…

It’s 2012, and more and more sites and blogs are looking for ways to further their user’s involvement, many taking example from, perhaps, one of the more polished of these sites, Buzzfeed.com.

What makes Buzzfeed different from sites such as Digg.com, which offers users a chance to vote on articles pulled from all over the web (the recent, highest rated articles, being the ones posted on the front page), is that it provides a front-end interface through which users can post their own articles, along with a similar style system to Digg, allowing you to share your ‘reaction’ on other articles…

Process Charting (also known as Process Mapping) is one of the oldest, simplest and most valuable techniques for streamlining work. It is used in nearly every level of production.

At the base of each product lays a properly designed production process that includes plenty of stages which help to channel efforts in the right direction and don`t get side-tracked from the main goal…

Did you know we trust attractive people more than unattractive ones?

Illogical, but true.

We like people who are nice to look at—and we want to say yes to people we like. Not only that, but we actually think beautiful people are smarter, kinder, and more trustworthy.

For my own part, I was once suckered into paid membership with an organization I’m ideologically opposed to because the young woman selling subscriptions was, well……

When users look for information, they have a goal and are on a mission. Even before you started to read this article, chances are you did because you either had the implicit goal of checking what’s new on Smashing Magazine, or had the explicit goal of finding information about “Navigation Design”.

After a couple of seconds of scanning this article, and maybe reading parts of the introduction, you may have started to ask yourself whether the information that you’re consuming at the moment is actually relevant to you—the user…

Choosing fonts for design projects can be a daunting task because there’s thousands of fonts out there all over the web that you could use.

Whether you’re looking to create a big, bold logo for your business or work on a poster for an event here’s a collection of inspiring fonts that are perfect for use whatever your project may be.

The collection covers a variety of themes from vintage to clean and simple…

There’s no doubt that eBook devices such as the Kindle and the Nook have changed how people read books forever. At the start of 2011 Amazon reported that for the first time eBook sales exceeded paperbacks. It’s doubtful this trend will ever be reversed.

Though with E ink devices, image heavy books tend to not work well (anyone who has tried viewing a PDF on an eBook will testify to this)…

This article is the fifth in our new series that introduces the latest, useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus.js, a library for Gmail-like client-side drafts and the fourth shared with us a free plugin called GuideGuide…

With close to a decade of experience in web design, I have come across plenty of mistaken beliefs about the latest design tools and technologies; but nothing beats the misconceptions surrounding the use of HTML 5.

As developers, we have our own set of misguided beliefs about a certain technology, but as we begin to use that technology we are able to understand what it is all about, its usage, and its scope…

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…