When King Design became Crowd Favorite last year, I employed a couple of techniques to try to make the web site transition as painless as possible.

Now if you visit kingdesign.net the Crowd Favorite site design is shown; with a small banner noting the rename being shown at the top of the page on the first page load:

Future visits to kingdesign.net are redirected to crowdfavorite.com, and the banner is not displayed again.¹ In another 6 months, I’ll probably get rid of this step and just give 301 redirects to everyone – just as I’ve been doing for the search engines already.

Previously, when someone came to kingdesign.net I would show them the old King Design web site design with a big banner at the top letting them know that we were now Crowd Favorite:

I left this in place for 7 months in the hopes that when people arrived at the King Design web site, it would not be a jarring experience like a straight redirect would be. However, we do need to complete the transition eventually, and so I made the next set of changes today (as planned).

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