[radioactive21]

It's just odd watching large sites repeat the same mistakes. First digg, and now the entire Gawker sites. It's as if they paid no attention to how badly a major change can have on their viewer base from past experiences.

Seriously, if you are going to make major changes to your website, do what many other sites have done. First you put up a discussion with features and looks that you want, then wait and see the reaction. If it's positive move to the next phase, create a beta page and randomly divert a viewer to the beta site. Then have an option to input opinion so you can see reactions.

Shocking your viewers with change is a horrible way to go about updating your website.

[arn]

"do what many other sites have done"

What sites have done this?

[MartinCron]

What sites Have done iterative and incremental changes, initially deployed to subsets of their users? I can immediately think of: Facebook, Amazon, twitter, zappos, and flickr.

It's generally not newsworthy because it generally doesn't lead to totally disruptive fiascos.