A New Look for Hopkinton Patch
Notice anything different? A couple changes to the homepage will make the site easier for you to navigate.
No, you're not losing it! Patch looks different today. We did a quick visual nip-and-tuck to the homepage to make it even more user-friendly. And we've moved a couple pieces of furniture. For those keeping score:
* We tweaked some words in our navigation bar to save space (e.g., "Traffic & Gas" is now "Commute")
* We moved the weather icon next to the Patch branding so you can find it more quickly!
* We moved, well, YOU closer to the top! (Our "shout stream" is now front and center to show all your comments off.)
* And of course we prettified a few things.
While the site might look a little different today, we still offer the same robust coverage of everything happening in your community. That was, is, and will always be our mission. We hope you'll let us know what you think of our tweaks - drop me a line (Sean.odonnell@patch.com) or offer a comment below!
Amy Ritterbusch
9:01 am on Thursday, March 29, 2012
So it looks like you can no longer post a comment directly to the home page, you can only post a comment to an article, blog post or event?
Jenn Wong
9:08 am on Thursday, March 29, 2012
"Hopkington" in the Commute section needs to be fixed. Also the beautification of the site looks to me like there are less colors and an enormous amount of advertising. Having the blogging and photo upload links easily accessible is nice.
Sean O'Donnell
12:05 pm on Thursday, March 29, 2012
Amy, that is correct there is no longer a spot to post directly to the homepage. I guess on other sites readers expressed confusion with that box and it was underutilized. Neither of those were problems on this site, in fact there were posts there weekly, but they wanted it to be uniform across all the sites.
Jenn, I've been trying to get Hopkington fixed for a while. The numbers that we get for that section come from Mapquest so it's a matter of me getting in touch with someone from there to correct the error.
I hope the upload and blogging links being easier to find will increase user content on the site, what you guys post is critical to helping me really find out what matters in town.
I will share both of your comments with the development team, I'm sure other people on different sites have had similar complaints.