If asked what my main goals for this blog would be…other than to babble on and on about personal thoughts…I would say that I would like to make After The Alter a place where people can go and talk about their marriage. There are so many places to go and talk about kids, and pregnancy and finances, but what about marriage? The basis of any family is the marriage that started it all, and in order to preserve that marriage it takes some work. So my goal is to build a community that acts as an open forum to talk about all things pertaining to life After The Alter (you don’t have to tell me Altar is spelled wrong…check out the link to find out why)

So the question is, how do I go about doing this? How do I reach out to my readers and ask them to reach out to others? How do I get people to share? That my friends is the million dollar question. My original idea was to build the community with a Facebook Fan Page . Here I was/am hoping that people would feel free to leave comments about their marriage, whether it was gripes about what their husband did that day, or share a wonderful recipe that was a huge hit with the family.  I also have been posting a question of the day and getting a little bit of a response. I love to see people interact. If you haven’t become an After The Alter fan yet please do! And let’s start sharing our stories! Feel free to even link up to your blog posts that fit into the marriage category! I’m sure my readers would love to see it!

My newest idea was to add a forum INTO the After The Alter blog, but that seemed to be a little more involved than I thought. My IT guy, Captain Awesome got it in, but I wasn’t sure if I liked how it looked.  I wasn’t happy with the wordpress plug in that allowed me to do that, so I am trying the next best thing. I started both a NING community and a Blog Frog Community. So far I am liking the Blog Frog Community better. I have even been getting answers to my forum questions! If you look on my right side bar you will see the Blog Frog Widget. If you sign up for blog frog, then visit my blog your picture will show up here with your blogs information! It’s very neat how it works! So please, hop on over to Blog Frog and become a friend of After The Alter!

Communities are what you make of them, and I hope that you find the topic of marriage an important and fun one. We all need a little support don’t we? Currently on my blog frog forum I started the discussions off with the following topics. Date Night: Here I’m hoping people will share their date night stories. What do you do to with your alone time together? (raunchy answers are always acceptable) Great Gift Ideas: Haven’t we all come upon a holiday or birthday and not have a clue what to get our spouse? After 9 years together I know I certainly have. Here I was hoping people could post great gift ideas that worked for them! Finally the topic of the art of being a housewife: Here I was hoping people could share tricks of the trade in making your house a home. Recipes, cleaning tips, and even fun new cocktails!

No matter what you have going on in your life whether it’s work, kids, school, or anything, it’s important to focus on how to be a good husband and wife. I believe that the key to a good and strong family begins with a strong marriage. So let’s embrace that and celebrate it! In order to do so it is important that we all share the secrets to our success! That’s what I want the After The Alter Community to be all about! So let’s get this party started!