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Client Information

St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y., serves as the premier Christian Orthodox seminary in the United States, and has a prominent global reach that draws students, faculty, and followers from every corner of the world.

With roots that reach back to 1794, when eight Russian monks arrived in Alaska with a mission to plant the seeds of the Orthodox Christianity on this continent, St. Vladimir’s was first chartered as a New York institution of higher learning in 1948. Today, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary offers four degree programs: Master of Divinity, Master of Arts, Master of Theology, and Doctor of Ministry.
 

Project overview

St. Vladimir’s sought to transform its Drupal 6 website into an engaging web experience that fueled ambitious new goals for recruitment, education, outreach, and fundraising, while further establishing its standing as a leader in the Orthodox Christian Church.

While the Drupal 6 CMS, built in 2010, had been retrofitted in 2015 for mobile responsiveness, the site was not as mobile friendly as it needed to be. 

The client described the UX of its previous site as a “maze to navigate,” along with dated aesthetics that did not reflect recent rebranding initiatives. Every aspect of the site, including the content, was in need of a refresh. 

To clarify and ensure stakeholder alignment concerning business requirements, technical functionality, integrations, and necessary enhancements to the new site, Promet Source engaged the St. Vladimir’s website team in a two-day design workshop. Among the overarching goals to that were agreed upon:

  • Intuitive, streamlined navigation,
  • A cleaner, simpler design and UX, 
  • Greater engagement among students, prospective students, alumni, and Orthodox communities, to drive both recruitment and fundraising, and 
  • Simplified content editing capabilities that provided content editors with greater flexibility for changing layouts and creating new pages. 

 

Technical Specifications

Deployment of Provus, which combined layout builder and flexible design component features, provided content editors with the ability to easily rearrange layouts, create new sections, and make updates -- all with the assurance that high quality designs and branding consistency would not be broken with the mixing up and switching out of page components.

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