301 redirects

[Brianfontana]

I recently took on a customer who had several doorway pages which were doing ok placement but nothing to write home about. I made new pages for the content and set up 301 redirects to the new pages with the new content. I lost all my rankings I had even though the new pages are optmized to the max...

Any ideas?
Are 301 redirects evil in SEO? Even as a temp fix?
If so how do you fix a problem like I had?
HELP!!!!
Sorry I'm new...