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The Pixel Punk Diaries |
I See Married People, Hello YM.lifeteen.com
I wanted to give you all updates on what's happening around lifeteen.com:
1. New Wallpapers: This is one of our most popular sections, so we decided it was time to treat it with some respect. So we've rolled out new wallpapers for your desktop through most of the spring.
2. People are Getting Married: I know that “marriage” is a distant idea for most teenagers in high school, so don't bail out on my just because this paragraph because it's about weddings. This is pretty cool. In the first half of this year, 4 members of our Life Teen staff got married. This is fantastic news because it breaks the disproves the theory that once you get hired by Life Teen you're destined to be single for the rest of your life.
In the first half of this year, 4 members of our Life Teen staff got married. - Suzanne Heil is the director of our summer camps, and she married her boyfriend Bobby Keppel. Bobby came through Life Teen at a parish in Missouri and has pitched in professional baseball ever since. (Although during the off season he did intern with the lifeteen.com store. Yes, that is random.)
- Adam Robo married his girlfriend Carolyna in Southern California. They met when they were both students at Steubenville's campus in Austria. They're a cute couple.
- Matt Smith (that's me) married Candyce, my longtime girlfriend. Some of you may remember that Candyce was the oldest daughter in the Life Teen Beach House a few years ago. We actually started dating about the same time she started keeping the blog here on the site. I thought it would be too much pressure if she wrote about our relationship because we thought it would be weird if we broke up. That never happened. We're married and I love her with my whole heart.
- Carlos Weaver, our print designer on staff will marry his girlfriend Erica.
- Johnny Oertle is now engaged to Ali Robo (Robezolli), Adam Robo's sister. Some of you may remember Johnny from the Life Teen Beach house a few summers ago. He had the big red afro. They'll be married in the fall.
3. Staff Grows: A lot of you all may recognize “Afro Greg” in our NewsBox. He came on as an intern in the late fall and has quickly become an integral part of our 3-man team that runs lifeteen.com. So we decided it was time to hire him full-time! You can see his touch all over the site, but mostly in the reviews section and on his Catholic Movie Reviews podcast on iTunes.
4. YM.lifeteen.com: It's been a month and a half since we launched a new website grown ups in youth ministry: YM.lifeteen.com. This website has been my personal project since the early fall of 2006, which would explain why I haven't updated my own section in so long. (Please forgive me.) The good news is that YM.lifeteen.com is up and working well as a Beta version, which means that it's not totally polished off with all the features or the final look. But it's online! Thank you Jesus.
We found that there were two distinct groups who come to lifeteen.com: teenagers and grownups. The expectations of these two groups were drastically different. To put it simply, teenagers wanted fun content about understanding God being Catholic in high school. And the grown-ups wanted info on how to help teenagers do that. They also wanted to know what Life Teen was as an organization, what we were about. It was time for a new site: YM.lifeteen.com.
Don't get me wrong, grownups are welcome to come online and check us out, but our staff is excited to not have the pressure of pleasing both age groups. This will give our small staff some big creative freedom for some young, fun content. We're very excited!
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Matt Smith is the Director of Internet Ministries for Life Teen, an international Catholic youth ministry based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the creative force behind Life Teen's cluster of websites that receive nearly 2 million visits a year. Since staring on MTV's "Real World" and MTV's "Road Rules Challenge", Matt has traveled the country speaking at colleges, universities, schools, and Catholic parishes.
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