It seems abcnews.com had the same idea (but probably long ago) to change the entire look of their site too. For me that’s going to take more getting used to than the new look of my own site.
Everything’s in need of an overhaul at some point – just to keep it fresh. In fact I got the idea of relocating my entire site and redoing the entire blog based on the fact that I was not at all happy with the old site. It was way too boring. The movement and adaptation of all the local web services was an afterthought. I’m much happier with the new look now that my template is pretty much done. And the speed seems to be much better as my site used to spend a lot of time waiting in line for the SQL server at totalchoicehosting.com. They received my cancellation notice today.