Re-Design Disaster

[sinicline]

Hi, I've had my website running for over 10 years. It's taken a while but I got up in the organic rankings in position one for a very important key phrase for my business.

So I decided to redesign my website to update it cosmetically and it's range of products. I didn't take much consideration into what this would do to it's organic rank (this is not my profession).

OK, so I launched the new website and I've dropped from position 1 to page 5 somewhere! Disastrous. At the time I did not know about 301 redirects. I guess I should have done some research but I didn't think it would effect my rank in this way.

I am confident that the new site is better optimised for ranking, despite it not appearing that way at the moment.

So I have a couple of questions.

1. I'm guessing 301 redirects would be a waste of time now that I've lost my ranking?

2. Does it take time to gain position again? The new website has been active for just over a week.

Any other advice would be greatly appreciated.

PS. I did read the stick regarding loss of rank but my situation is not covered in the points there.