Before the Register revamped its existing Web site and launched a separate site for visitors last week, some of us tried to envision the reactions we’d get from users.

We believed the upgrades were for the better and figured most readers would agree, but we knew change would not be for everyone.

Lo and behold, the prophecies of the doubters came true. The very first comment on the readers’ forum on the redesign was as follows, “You worked on this for months? Next time shoot me an e-mail. I’ll have my 10-year-old son help you and maybe do a better job.”

There’s nothing quite like the blogosphere to bring you down to earth — or to make you want to reinforce the child labor laws already on the books. But it turns out this commentator was in the minority.

Many readers immediately praised the new news site, others wisely said they needed to get used to it before rendering a verdict. Several offered notes of praise to Register Multimedia Producer Dan Ross.

Dan indeed deserves praise for his critical role in relaunching napavalleyregister.com and creating insidenapavalley.com, more about that in a moment.

But others, known to few readers, deserve credit as well. I’m not going to name everyone involved, because this isn’t the Oscars. Here are the big three: Brian Kennedy, Kim Backstrom and Pete Wierich.

Kennedy came to Napa a little more than year ago as the first online content coordinator in the 145 year history of the Register. He has used his wiry frame, Web smarts and hard work to drag us click by click into the 21st century.

A native of Fairfield who went to Armijo High School and Solano Community College, Brian first did newspaper and online work for the Chico State University paper, the Orion.

He is an avid and knowledgeable student of news Web sites — both their guts and their appearance, and applied those skills in adopting the best practices while ditching stale or user-unfriendly conventions.

Backstrom is the artist who created insidenapavalley.com. This new site is a companion to the Register’s news site, offering nuggets for visitors and those in the market for Wine Country real estate: Calendars of events, home, winery and restaurant listings, arts and wine-related features and some basic 411 on Napa County schools, houses or worship and government services.

Backstrom has been hidden in the Web cave of the Register for two years, doing graphic design for our Web and print advertisers. Before that the Midwestern daughter of a military family worked for the Billings Gazette in Montana, and first did Web design in the heart of the dot.com world with AOL, among others.

Wierich, whose multifarious Web activities at the Register date back to 2001 and without whom nothing good would happen online, asked me to not to write about him, so I won’t.

But if I did, I’d point out that his handiwork is everywhere on our sites — and that he is more than 10 years old.