Above and beyond the design we also worked to optimize the site’s load and render performance as well as making the server stand up the traffic demands that yoast.com generates.

Hand drawn illustrations, advanced CSS and completely unique styling make this re-design project one we’re very proud of.

This project has been showcased quite a bit on the various design galleries and received numerous mentions from around the blogosphere including:

• 10 Simple and Impressive Design Techniques
• Blog Headers: 20 Great Examples and Best Practices
• Design Spotlight: Yoast

Last year we updated the look and feel of the various applications: marketplace, codes, invites, france, mashtracker etc, this year we’re focusing more on the user experience of the main blog itself and exposing the evergreen content that users frequent the site for as well as the daily news topics that users want as well.

This redesign is a great step towards subsequent initiatives that will allow all of the segments of the readership to find the content they want more easily on Mashable and keep them on the site.

CSS 3 is a completely content-driven site and as such the focus of the redesign was to simply identify and resolve minor usability issues and improve the performance of the blog from a user experience standpoint. Thanks to the great plugins by Joost de Valk, the redesign process was very straight forward.

The result of the redesign was a nice traffic bump and a consistent boost to the blog’s RSS feed. Users can also now learn more about the contributors as we exposed profiles for the bloggers working on the project.