I do not have a lot of time to make a full drawn out comment as to what I liked and disliked about the redesign. But I will say this. In a number of areas like

I do not have a lot of time to make a full drawn out comment as to what I liked and disliked about the redesign. But I will say this. In a number of areas like "Answer question" and the search bar, I felt you helped give them more prominence which is good! I'm a sucker for less is more and many of the tweaks you made to remove clutter also helped. That said I found your method of notification and menu aggregation a little to heavy handed. On a side note: When doing a site redesign like this, it is a good idea to try and keep the same content as your sample. Adding that new copy forces the viewer to separate what is a design change from what is content. This in turn causes people to loose focus on the design changes, and even in some cases fail to see or understand those changes.