Selenium IDE is a bad road to go down if you're in any type of continuous deployment environment. Your test suite is unmaintainable after a dozen or so cases. What has worked for me is to use WebDriver directly, and to separate the testing and implementation logic. The testing side is driven by standard JUnit fixtures, and the implementation side follows the page object design pattern. Now even with huge changes or "pivots" to the UI, you only have to update a few xpaths and setter/getters in your page objects.
There's more info here: http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects