The New Republic has redesigned its website and broken all of its old links in the process. As a design, the site is a disaster. No structure, no flow. The gray backgrounds simultaneously cause you to ignore the blog content and to feel as though the white background content is pinched and crowded. When I look at the page my eye moves down and leaps to the right (skipping the blog posts AND the icon-ed navigation) following the white background, but there's nothing to see, because the lower section is actually just more navigation and old headlines. I can't even figure out what it is they want the reader to focus on.
Breaking old links is just poor form and poor design. It shouldn't be up to the reader to fix old links, and a 404 message is just really weak. Websites should always be backward compatible, or advise users how to locate old content.
As websites go, this redesign is a perfect example of what not to do.
