My relaunched site's traffic has halved. Any ideas why webbit?!

Recently I relaunched a long-running music webzine of mine (8 years old next March). We typically received around a thousand pageviews/unique users per day.

The new site is way nicer looking, prioritises content much more intelligently, and is SEO optimised in ways the old one wasn't (better use of h1/h2/h3, better <title>s, meta descriptions etc).

The only problem is that since the relaunch, traffic has dropped off quite considerably. Here's the Google Analytics data for the 2 weeks before and after the relaunch: Visits / Pageviews. The relaunch was October 17th, right in the middle of the graphs.

For the sake of comparison, here's the old site (archive.org version) and here is the new one.

My only answer is that either a) the drastic change of design might have confused regular readers, or b) a majority of our traffic was bouncing immediately - two of our top-searched articles are album reviews for records called "Rabbit Fur Coat" and "Sex Positions".

Can anyone in webbit give me any possible causes for this? Is there anything that stands out that could be causing this to happen? Obviously when we relaunched the traffic was high as we promoted it heavily, and haven't done that as much since, but we weren't doing anything to promote the site at all before the relaunch.

EDIT: A couple more stats, which make things a little better.

2 Weeks Prior to Relaunch

• 14528 visits
• 22865 pageviews
• 1.57 page/visit
• 75% bounce rate
• 0:55 time spent on site
• 80% new visits

2 Weeks After Relaunch

• 8920 visits
• 19,017 pageviews
• 2.13 pages/visit
• 66% bounce rate
• 1:34 time spent on site
• 68% new visits

I guess this means we've probably dropped in search rankings but are getting more repeat visits.