Where did all my Google traffic go?

I learned a valuable lesson this month. Over the past year that I have built up my blog I have slowly grown my daily traffic, while still not astounding, it was nice to see it slowly growing. My blog used to be blog.imhmedia.net, but it always had my name in the title. I decided I should buy www.ianhoar.com before someone else did and transfer the site to the new domain. Anyway, my traffic instantly plummeted to about 1/3 of what it was before the name change. Google is even crawling and indexing the site much slower than it use too.

Now for some reason I thought that Google would just recognize that it was the same site, but apparently not. After searching around a bit I quickly learned that changing the name / domain of your site is a very bad idea. Now I am slowly building up traffic again and preparing a redesign, but it was a lesson learned, and luckily my site was still fairly new.