Hello!  I’m Heather, wife of Jimmy, the founder of this website.  From time to time, I’ll be posting as a guest author.

Here’s a little info about me.  I grew up in a small town in Idaho, 5th of 7 children.  I graduated from Ricks (BYU-I) and BYU Provo way back in the 1990’s (my 7-year-old daughter acts like we’re sooooo old-fashioned because we were born in the 1900’s).

I met the love of my life after I graduated from BYU.  We crossed paths at the drinking fountain and were married 8 months later in the Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple.  We’ve had fun adventures living in Florida, Arizona, Tennessee, and Utah.

I’m mama to 4 cute tots, ages 7, 5, 2, and 6 months.  Our home is a little crazy with energetic kids (especially those 3 boys!!!), but we are constantly striving to teach them that happiness comes from living the gospel of Jesus Christ.  We’re all a work in progress – especially me!

I love hiking in the mountains, playing the piano, reading a good book, eating dark chocolate, and being with my family. I  love my beautiful, ordinary life!

Any of you who have visited Mormon Mission Prep since the beginning of the new year will have already noticed this, but over Christmas break I redesigned the Web site.  Actually, I have done far more than simply redesigning the look of the site, I added a Spanish version of the site and I changed the underlying technology the site is built on. I hope you all enjoy the new site design and new features.  Feel free to give many any feedback you have.

Spanish Version of Mormon Mission Prep

From the beginning, I have wanted to do the site in both Spanish and English.  Up until recently, though, I have used my limited time and resources to simply get the site up and running in my native English.   But with recent requests from readers, and the opportunity provided by the technology change, I decided to go ahead and create a Spanish version of Mormon Mission Prep.

Not all blog posts have been translated yet, but I will slowly be working on them.  What I have translated thus far is about 8 of the most recent blog posts, and most of the other pages in the top navigation menu. I’ve also created a Spanish Facebook page and a Spanish YouTube channel for the mission prep videos, though I’ve only translated one of the videos so far. Here’s a run down of the Spanish and English content:

Under the Hood Technology

For those of you interested in the technical details, I moved the site from being run on the Windows-based BlogEngine.net, to the Linux-based WordPress.  BlogEngine was okay during the first year of running the site, but I began to run into more and more limitations with it.  WordPress is a powerful free blog platform that provides me all the resources I need to run the site now and long into the future.

I’m happy to announce that the Mormon Mission Prep site has a new design.  I hope you like it, but feel free to give me feedback, good or bad. 

The new design is intended to reduce clutter and make the site more clean. I improved the navigation to make the most used content and features more prominent, and I also made the site more compatible Safari and Firefox for Mac.

You’ll also notice a new Mormon Mission Prep Widget in the right hand navigation.  This widget has the new look and feel of the site and has improved functionality from the old widget, including links to recent posts.  To add the widget to your site, click on the Get Widget link at the bottom of the widget and you will be shown several options to install it on Facebook, your blog, or code to install it on any Web page.