Staying in touch with friends and family can be difficult during important events in your life. Whether it is a time of joy or sadness, you want your loved ones to share in your happiness and lend their support when you need it most.

CareCentral provides friends and families with a central hub to keep in touch, stay informed, and share support. Creating a CareCentral site takes just a few minutes, but building a network of support can be one of the most important things you can do at a critical time in your life.

You can participate in CareCentral by creating a site for yourself or a loved one, or visiting someone else's CareCentral site.

As a site author, you can:

• Update your friends and family on important events in your life with journal entries, announcements, and photos
• Invite others to view and participate in your site
• Let loved ones know how they can help you by asking for volunteers in the �Lend a Hand� section
• Look up contact information of the people who join your site

As a site visitor, you can:

• Check on the status of a loved one by reading their latest journal entries or announcements
• Leave messages of support or communicate with other site visitors in the "Community Forum"
• Volunteer to help out in the "Lend a Hand" section
• Keep track of everything that is happening on the site at a glance using the "News Feed"

There is no right or wrong way to begin building your CareCentral site, but you might consider entering a bit of information about yourself in the "About Me" section, and inviting your friends and family to view and participate in your site.

It is important to let your loved ones know that you have created a new CareCentral site to keep in touch during important events in your life. To send them a message, click on the "Invite Friends" button after you have logged in, and add their email addresses in the box, separating each email with a comma. You can also upload addresses from your online address book at one time in Outlook, Hotmail, or other email programs.

Your friends and family will be sent a brief email with a link to your site. You may also want to include a personalized message to let them know exactly why you have invited them to participate in your site.

Once you receive the link to your loved one's site, you can easily add it to your list of favorite sites by clicking on the "Favorites" or �Bookmarks� menu at the top of your browser and clicking "add to favorites."

Anyone can create and maintain a site for a loved one, with their permission.

We ask everyone who participates in a CareCentral site to register with us to maintain privacy and security. To join CareCentral, you will need a valid email address. We will never share your information with anyone without your expressed permission.

There are several free services that can provide you with an email address, such as hotmail.com, yahoo.com or aol.com. It is important to have a valid email address so you can communicate with other community members and so that we can reach you in case there is a problem with your site.

Yes. No one can see any part of your site unless you explicitly invite them. Your family and friends can request an invitation by going to the site's home page and filling in a brief form.

In addition, your CareCentral login page is protected by "Secure Socket Layer" (SSL) encryption, which keeps others from viewing your password when you log in. You will see a yellow closed padlock icon in the address bar of your Web browser when you log in. This icon lets you know that SSL is activated.

CareCentral's services are free to use!

Yes. If you make one of the visitors on your site a "co-author," they will also be able to write journal entries, post photos, and invite others to join. To do this, click "view all/edit" in the community box in the upper right corner, then select the person you�d like to give "site author" privileges to.

If you forget your password, you can enter your email address on the login page and we will send you a new one. You'll need that password to login to your site, so keep it in a safe place.

Your site will stay active until you choose to delete it.

After you have logged into your site, you can click on the "My Sites" link at the top right of the screen. You will then have the option to delete your site. This will permanently erase all of your information, including journal entries, pictures, announcements, and forum messages.