Dispatch.com will have a new look when you arrive at our home page after 9 a.m. on Thursday.

And while those who have seen it like the new look, more important is the fact that it will load faster and offer a better user experience.

The website was developed in partnership with world-renowned design firm Garcia Media. It was a true partnership, with input from the newsroom — based in part on input from you to us — about how the site should look and function.

And it truly is all about you. Our goal is to improve the experience for readers and advertisers, and we hope you agree that it does that. If not, I'm confident that you will tell me. And before anyone slips into a full-on impression of my good friend John Switzer, whose column appears in the Sunday Metro & State section and is well known for saying "I hate change, even for the better," you will see that we retained the best of Dispatch.com while upgrading and enhancing aspects that needed a tune-up.

Perhaps the most important new feature is that it is "responsive design," which means that it will respond and reformat itself for the device on which you are viewing it. This will be most noticeable on cellphones. If you open a browser on your phone and go to the current Dispatch.com, it will appear as a miniature version of the site as it appears on a big computer screen.

The new design will reformat itself for the phone, using readable type and larger photos.

It also will load much faster, which means virtually no wait time between when you click on Dispatch.com and the site appears before your eyes.

The new design places an emphasis on photos, which allows us to showcase the work of our talented photo staff. You will see a distinct improvement in the size and quality of the images. We also have included direct access to the slideshows in our photo galleries from the home page.

You'll also see a larger video player. We can see by the traffic to Dispatch videos that you like them, so we're giving you easy access and a bigger screen on which to view them.

The overall site is wider when viewed on a computer screen, with the editorial content taking up the full width of the window, unlike in the old design.

You'll find an "infinite scroll" feature, which allows you to breeze through stories by scrolling rather than clicking to the next page.

The structure of our old design limited our ability to embed relevant links, video and other related content within stories. It allows for easier access to sidebars, graphics, photos, videos and related stories.

You'll find that overall, the site is cleaner and easier to navigate, using more photos as visual aids in the navigation.

You'll also find that, much like when you move furniture in your house, it can be a little disorienting at first, but you always manage to find the couch or your favorite chair in short order. If your first reaction is that we moved your favorite chair out of the house to the curb, please look around for it first. And if you don't find it, send us a note. (We'll provide a link on the homepage that will allow readers to comment and ask questions.)

You'll find, for example, that the "latest headlines" column that appears on the left-hand side of the home page on the old site is labeled "happening now" on the new site and appears on the right-hand side of the page. (Click on the "happening now" label to see an expanded list.) The left-hand column and the center of the page will be dominated by the top stories of the hour — breaking news and stories that are likely to be of great interest to the broadest audience.

We still have a navigation bar across the top of the page that allows quick access to directories of stories by topic — news, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, obituaries, the "e-edition" replica of the newspaper, and advertising sections for jobs, cars and homes.

And a pull-down menu allows you to drill down quickly to your favorite topics. Click on "sections" in the top left corner, and you can zip, for example, to "BlueJacketsXtra" and slide down to choose news, chats, podcasts, blogs, photos and videos.

Months of planning and behind-the-scenes heavy lifting have gone into preparing this new site. Dispatch.com is a robust site containing hundreds of thousands of files of information — stories, photos, videos and advertisements — and while some of the transfer process was automated, it was not seamless. Some of it required manual labor from a newsroom team as well as digital specialists from across the company.

Some of that work will continue even after the launch as the team reconnects the occasional broken link or rebuilds collections of content, such as those in our library of special projects.

Come Thursday, you'll have a chance to see and use the new Dispatch.com. We encourage you to explore it, and we hope that you like it. Let us know what you think.

Alan D. Miller is editor of The Dispatch.

amiller@dispatch.com

@dispatcheditor