Jared Spool writes about The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch, promoting continuous design improvements over the big-bang all-or-nothing redesign of a site.
Towards the end of the article he talks about how task success is key for users - and how it influences users' perception of the design:
"Our findings show that consistency in the design plays second fiddle to completing the task. When users are complaining about the consistency of a site, we've found that it is often because they are having trouble completing their tasks. On sites where users easily complete their tasks, the users seem to pay little attention to glaring inconsistencies, often telling us in their ratings that the site was indeed very consistent."
This is an interesting but not entirely surprising finding. Intranets and portal-style sites often provide a gateway to a number of distinct applications - if each of the applications works well for the user, design differences don't seem very important. Of course, all things being equal, design consistency is a good thing and enhances usability. But the usability of an individual part of a site shouldn't be compromised at the altar of consistency.
When I teach web design or mentor developers, I typically have to revisit consistency again and again. This applies both at the interface and within the code itself (consistently structured code is much easier to maintain - and is usually better written in the first place as it benefits from good practices and proven patterns). There's a lengthy process of getting people to understand simple things such as if the save button comes before the cancel button on this form, it should be in the same place on that form - or that standard navigation links should appear in the same place on the page throughout the site.
But once that lesson has been drilled in and become second nature, it's time to start questioning it. Sometimes slavish consistency doesn't work - sometimes it makes sense to move something or do something differently so that it works better in this particular instance. Consistency aids usability, but usability always trumps blind consistency.
And to return to Spool's theme in the article, this often comes up during an evolutionary redesign. You realise that the standard for the site isn't as good as it could be and you start to deploy sections where different rules apply. Any discomfort the user feels for the change should be outweighed by the benefits of improved task completion. (Of course, if it's not you're losing out on both sides and should quickly rethink your approach.) So consistency and house standards are good but usability is better.
10:33:39 PM 
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