When you have an established site, one of the most tumultuous events that can happen is a major site redesign. No matter what the changes are, no matter what the improvements are, there is always a very vocal group of people who simply hate it.
Now, to be fair to those users, changing the look and feel of a site that they’ve grown accustomed to is certainly a disorienting experience.
Macworld is about to undergo a major site redesign and has already seen a bit of criticism based on the beta site. The other scary part of their move is a change in forum software from UBB.threads to Jive. I suspect the outcry from that move alone could drown out any criticisms of their site design. Hopefully, they’ve spent time to make the forums “feel” the same as it did under UBB.threads. Good luck!
The fear of a site-redesign has what kept MacRumors in its current form for the past 4 years. But lately I’ve decided that its time to look into a site redesign and we’re starting to look for the right designer to do it.
Normalkid 
I read print magazines and newspapers as well as online news sites. Every time any of them changes their fonts, colors, spacing, style, etc., I have an immediate negative reaction.
IT’S NOT THE WAY IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE!
But, soon enough, I’m used to it and think the “old style” was rather silly looking in hindsight. So it will be with a website redesign. Changes to a site’s look are useful and even necessary now and then, to keep the site fresh and interesting.
As long as none of the changes interfere with practical use of the site, the furor will always die down.
The one change that I actually enjoyed quite a bit was when Google went from their text logo to their image (current) logo.