It came to my attention recently, mostly because someone close to me was preparing to enter the Provo Missionary Training Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that futuremissionaries.com, a site devoted to helping young men and women prepare to serve LDS missions, is not providing many resources that actually help someone prepare. In addition to that, it is not providing anything that cannot be found on one of our other sites. The intention behind futuremissionaries wasn't for those who have just received their calls to get information (even though they can), but for those 14 or 15 year olds out there that want to be the best missionaries they can when the time comes. It's a long term preparation. But what can we offer on that site that can't be found elsewhere? As of now, it looks like it is just another LDSTeenHelp site except for missionary questions, and that is not how we want it, because users of LDSTeenHelp should be able to ask missionary related questions there also and not have to visit FutureMissionaries in order to ask those because missionary questions are part of growing up an LDS teen. So, what we need is a restructuring of programs that will provide help and support for those that are actively preparing or want to be actively preparing but do not know where to start. I'm thinking that we should throw out the whole thing and start from scratch with the user in mind, rather than just implement programs because we have the ability to do so. Any suggestions in this process are welcome.

Update on site changes: The new website is underway, but not accessible to the public. We will launch the new site first through LDS Teen Help, mostly because those users don't seem to have a problem telling us when they want something fixed (that's a good thing.) In addition to everything that I have talked about in previous posts, this new site will have a mailbox and you can send and receive messages to other site users. This is an addition that I was impressed with, thanks to a current programmer. I will meet with the programmer responsible for these changes this week and we should have the site available to the public soon. We will most likely first set up our moderators so that they are in place before we launch the site entirely.