You may have noticed, our website looks a bit different.

While thousands of students are serving around the world this summer, Next Step’s media team has been hard at work designing and developing a brand new website.

Why you ask?

Really there are 3 reasons for the switch…

1. Next Step Vibe: We are a bunch of young, crazy, Christ-followers; and we try to infuse everything Next Step with this same energy. So when you arrive on a mission site you feel the excitement and passion we have for serving our awesome God. We want you to experience this same vibe when visiting our website. So we embraced a new design, colors and overall feel to help you understand who we are as an organization.

2. Flexible Content: Without getting too technical, we’ve built our new website on a different platform from our previous website. This allows us to easily change and update the website’s design and content. So as we add new mission locations or update current locations, you will have the most up-to-date information at your fingertips.

3. Trip Dashboard: With our previous website we added a mission trip backend where you could find all your trip information, fill out forms and access payment information. This was a huge resource for our mission teams, but we also recognized its limitations. We are hard at work developing a whole new backend for 2015 we are calling the Trip Dashboard. It will have all the same features of our previous backend in addition to a few new ones. You will now be able to process payments online and have one account with multiple trips. We’ve also made it easier to navigate. We are still putting the final touches on the Trip Dashboard and it should be available come August.

While our new website has many of the same features of our previous website, there is one new feature we want to highlight — The Blog. We will be updating this area regularly with information about our communities, mission trips and new developments within Next Step. So if you want all the latest Next Step news, be sure to visit this section often.

We hope that all of these changes improve your experience interacting with our website. But with such a big change, there is bound to be a few wrinkles along the way that we have to work out. If you ever come across an area of our website that doesn’t work or seems confusing, please let us know and we’ll do everything we can to fix it or make it better. We appreciate your patience and help!

Now the only thing left to do is to explore the website and register for a mission trip!

Hope you enjoy the new website!