Building an Internet Campus Experience can be as simple and as difficult as you’d like it to be; picking your poison of challenges is the easy part.

But building one that is worthy of your ministry and mission/vision is something entirely different. I’m experiencing this first hand with the launch of North Point Online.

And launching this type of product is nothing like the other products that I’ve launched in my lifetime; there’s something uniquely special and infinitely more important in creating something that is so closely tied with the redemptive story of God’s work through Jesus Christ in the Gospel.

With all that can be done, it’s a question of what should be done. My umbrella strategy (my secret sauce) is simplicity.

Our goal is to provide as obvious an experience as possible without bombarding the viewer with competing functionalities and feature sets. It’s far too easy to “bloat” the experience, and if it’s too “basic” out the gate, well, you can always add later.

If your Internet Campus Experience has feature sets that aren’t absolutely necessary and that do not add explicitly and directly to the overall mission and strategy of the organization or model, you should just get rid of them. It’s too easy to “click” away from the experience; simple as that.

You’ve only got a few seconds to capture their attention, and only one shot at a first impression.

What does your experience tell (or show) your visitor? Does it tell them that you’re a complicated mess with multiple-avenues of experience or that you know what you’re doing?