Let me begin with an acknowledgement. This blog exists thanks in large part to the silent work of my wife and editor, Alison. Over the course of the past three years, she’s had to not only edit over 670 individual posts, she’s had to endure endless thoughts, ideas, and design changes. She’s been patient, kind, thoughtful, and incredibly helpful. Without Alison, there would be no Catholic Husband.

Three years is a long time to work on any one project. Although I intended from the beginning to work on Catholic Husband consistently, I did not have any expectation that it would endure for this long. We have great momentum as we enter our fourth year and I wanted to take a moment to share with you some of the wonderful things that are happening here.

My main focus over the past year has been to improve the quality of my writing. I’ve been trying to be more honest, thorough, and to make the few minutes that you spend each day reading Catholic Husband outrageously helpful. That intense focus has caused some other things to fall through the cracks, including my activity on social media and the development of additional resources. I’m confident in saying that the quality of posts has improved significantly and I have sufficient buffer in scheduling that now I can turn my attention to other improvements.

My goal as a web designer is to allow the content to take center stage and for the physical aspects of a site to fade into the background. I want readers to have a frictionless, distraction free experience that allows you to simply get what you came for. To that end, I’ve made significant improvements to the site for your benefit.

The first thing that you’ll soon notice is the speed of the site. I’ll be moving Catholic Husband onto cloud servers next month that are incredibly fast. We’re talking about load times of 151ms. Fast, fast, fast. I’ve stopped adding images to posts because they were getting in the way and slowing down the site. I’ve turned back on the comment system so that we can engage and discuss a particular topic within the context of the content. I’ve also given the appearance of the site a facelift so that won’t require frequent maintenance. That means less time playing with the website and more time working on other things that are helpful. I’ve also fully encrypted the site, so you’ll see a little lock in your web browser address bar letting you know that everything is safe and sound.

Three years of consistent posting has helped me to better understand my voice and the things that I want to write about. To that end, I’ve streamlined the categories system to reflect the new focus of Catholic Husband: Faith, Family, and Food. These are the three best parts of a man’s life and so that’s where I’m going to focus. You’ll be able to explore these three vast categories through a revamped tagging system. Under this new focus, I’m particularly excited about writing about food. I plan to share recipes, cooking techniques, and ultimately to demonstrate that cooking is not all that difficult. If you’re already a home chef, I’d love for you to jump in and share your favorites, too! Food really is awesome.

Our fourth year is going to be a year of tremendous growth. Now that I know who I am, what I am, and what I want to share, I’m ready to get intentional about spreading the word about Catholic Husband. I hope that you’ll help me with this goal. My objective for Catholic Husband hasn’t changed from day one: to be a place where men who are serious about their vocation can come to grow and meet likeminded men.

I want to sincerely thank you again for being a part of the early days of Catholic Husband. Your support, feedback, and interactions have been instrumental in shaping the vision and direction of Catholic Husband. I’ve met some wonderful people and I’m excited for us to welcome even more into our group. I’m also thankful to the many strong women who read this blog. Although I write for men, I’m humbled that you would read and share these words with your husband so that you both might benefit from the gift of mutual growth.