A Note to Our Readers about Changes on Patch

Dear Patch Readers,

You may have noticed that Patch looks a lot different than it did last week. This is just the beginning of a series of changes over the next days and weeks that we hope will make Patch easier to read, more responsive to users and, most importantly, a much easier place for you to contribute and share content about your communities. As we get our new system up and running there may be some headaches -- in fact, we’ve already encountered a few ourselves -- but we wanted to give you the low-down on where we’re headed.

A few of the changes we’ll be introducing:

A new design for our pages that will make them easier to read and that will allow our editors to make better use of photos and videos in their reporting on your communities.

A new, more responsive commenting system that will allow users to post photos, up-vote great content, and down-vote the bad stuff. Commenters can sign in with Facebook, Twitter, Google or with their own log ins. Anonymous posting will still be allowed but our users and moderators will have better tools to elevate the conversation.

Better plumbing. You’ll no longer have time to make a cup of coffee as you wait for our pages to load. The site will be many times faster than our old site, allowing you to move more easily between stories and user posts. The site is also optimized for use on mobile devices -- the way nearly half our readers access Patch.

New navigation. Many Patch users visit multiple Patches. We’ve made it easier to visit nearby Patches and to create your own list of frequently visited Patches. Stories and content from local Patches now roll up to state pages, and there is a new USA Patch page that will feature the best content from our network of over 900 sites.

We’ll be rolling out a new simple-to-use contribution page that will allow Patch users -- both individuals and community organizations -- to post their own content the same way editors do. Users and organizations will have their own pages on Patch that feature their posts, photos and videos. Great content from users will flow to designated slots on our home pages.

We’ll also have better sharing tools. Patch now has 289 ways to share content by our users and editors across other media. This will allow our users and organizations to utilize Patch as a publishing platform for all their social content.

More changes are on the way. We’ll be tweaking the design of our article pages and Patch home pages this week, adding revamped versions of our calendars and boards in the coming weeks, putting the weather forecast back in our newsletters (we heard you) and adding new features we’re not quite ready to talk about yet. We know there will be glitches, and we will get things wrong. We hope you’ll bear with us. Perhaps the best feature of our new platform is that it allows us to quickly make changes and to respond to what our users want. To that end, we’d like to hear what you think, and we promise we’ll listen. You can email your thoughts to sitefeedback@patch.com.

All of these changes reflect our commitment to serve as a digital town square for our communities. Reporting and journalism are vital components of that commitment, alongside the voices of community members themselves. We know we’ve got a long way to go, but in the meantime we’ll be giving it all we’ve got to be worthy of our users. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Sincerely,
The Patch Team