Andy Clough said:
... and to make the design responsive so it works as well on smartphone and tablet, which now accounts for 40% of our user traffic. A lot of users complained the old site was hard to use on mobile devices, for which it was not designed ...
Fair enough point ... but what about the 60% of user traffic that don't use spartphones/tablets ? Is that not a majority of your users ? Earlier this year a very famous (now infamous) Genealogy site changed their look and feel of their WEB site, partly because, and I quote, "about 40% of our users were accessing the site via smartphones and tablets". Sound familiar ? That Genealogy site had to admit that they screwed it up and are now re-designing their site to make it "look and feel like the old site". They did not count on the "silent majority" getting up and leaving their (subscription) site. They used a horrible looking grey font (like this one), grey and white backgrounds (like this one), a constant use of a mouse roll button (scrolling), nothing fitting on one screen due to narrow blocks of text/pictures. Definetely sounds familiar, did you use the same WEB designers ? They also used the same "Technically, the old site was well past its sell-by date and needed a massive upgrade under the bonnet" excuse, well from my professional past you can indeed update whats under the bonnet but without having to "update" the user interface as well.
I know that WEB sites can detect what user's hardware is, so like a few sites that I use would it not have been better to ceate a "Desktop" version and a "Mobile Device" version ?
Anyway, I actually have a headache from using this new site (seriously, I have, my eyes are having issues with the readability of it) so I'm off to a more easy reading site. If there is just one major change that you do please change the font and the size of the font.