Hello!  And welcome to the new look of The JonesLife!  What began as a simple desire to make the blog page look a bit more slick has morphed into this – a whole new website complete with the new look we were after as well as new features and a more refined purpose.  It’s funny to see how a solitary idea can snowball into something so much…well, not so solitary after all!

I’ll give you a quick tour to get you acquainted with everything…

• Above the JonesLife banner, you will see the links to the different pages on the site.  There is a distinct purpose to this site which you will discover on the “Shine On” page.  As with the original site, Eliot has her own page, “Little Miss E~”, with an update on her world!  We’ll update that page with pics, videos, and as many of her wacky quotes as we can keep track of!  We will provide frequent updates on the ever-growing, ever-changing Fab Five through the blog posts and on most every other page on the site.
• Below the JonesLife banner are the different blog categories.  We went back through all of the blog posts and categorized them for easier following.  Each new post will be categorized as well.
• All of the categories are pretty self-explanatory except for “Gotta Have It!”  This is one of the more exciting parts of the new site for us and will be evolving quite a bit over the next few months.  Read more about what that’s all about by following this link:  http://joneslife.net/wordpress2/2009/11/gotta-have-it/.
• To the right of the categories, there is an orange button that says, “RSS”.  If you’d like to make following this blog a bit easier, click that button and follow the instructions to get an email every time we’ve updated the site…cool, huh?!
• The “Featured Posts” box will highlight a small group of the more popular posts that have been done along with any other special features we’d like to highlight at the moment.  Just click on the picture to visit that post!
• Below “Featured Posts” are the most current blog posts with the latest one appearing in the biggest box.
• To the right, we have some of the features of the old blog – Twitter Feed, Blog Comments – and a new feature – Flickr photo feed.  The Flickr photo feed will be constantly changing as we move along through this life, camera in hand, ready to capture the moment!  The side bar will continue to change on a fairly regular basis as we come across cool new features and other stuff that we’d like to share with y’all…fun stuff, to be sure!

Of course, this site will revolve around the happenings of the Quint Crazies and their impact on this family as it always has so check back often for baby updates, pictures, videos, and general wackiness from Brooklyn, Britton, Jack, Lila, and Ryan.  But the coolest thing about this new format is the opportunities for community growth that we have strived for from the start and also the fact that this is only the beginning of what we hope to accomplish by sharing our family life with as many folks as we can!  That snowball that started to roll a few months ago has really picked up steam and shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon!

God Bless!