You're right, the redesign looks shoddy and inconsistent with modern layout conventions. Truth be told, they probably didn't hire a designer to do the work.
We have a designer on staff (as another commenter mentions, the excellent Allison House - http://allisonhou.se). Design is a very big priority for us and this redesign is the first of many we'll make - it's an incremental process and we're focused on improving our designs until they're just right.
I understand that the post about your site ambushed you out of nowhere and you were immediately compelled to shift into damage control by flooding the thread about how hard you were working on your design problem and all the other lip service the community demands. It's an unexpected pain and I sympathize with anyone who has to go through it.
However, shifting blame to one of your employees in an effort to cover your own ass for burping a lemon signals poor judgement and a lack of maturity on your part. To silence the critic, all you had to do was acknowledge the problem, allude to being "in development" and thank the over-eager Michal for pointing it out. Instead, you made it worse by exposing internals for a problem you should've taken responsibility for alone. Probably at the price of their reputation.
Your job today is to seek them out and make a personal apology.
Had it been a bug in the code, I highly doubt you would've named the entire dev team in a thread and pointed out the party responsible.
The visual design is poor enough, not to mention the actual code implementation but the interface itself is even more disjointed and incoherent, using a varied mix of metaphorical elements on the view that have no implied structure, hierarchy or continuity. It's as if each part of the view was designed in isolation without regard for the others.
I'd love to hear your feedback a bit more in-depth, jsavimbi - as mentioned, we do indeed have an in-house designer and design is a big priority for us. We'd love to hear what you think we can do better. Feel free to email us - contact (at) codecademy (dot) com. I'll read every email.
> That turkey wasn't ready to come out of the oven.
Like development, design works best by iteration. The overall concept isn't bad per se, the implementation looks to be haphazard and needs style, tone, ease of use and continuity.
Michal did a sufficient job of providing examples right there, although I'd caution that very ambitious young man, programmer and designer not to use such an aggressive approach while still an SFSU student, photographer and soon to be entrepreneur (wtf does that mean?).
I call not trolling simply because I agree with the premise that the redesign is half-baked.
I hope you'll bear with us as we fix this one.