Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Aaron Couch, Director of Technology Solutions, Promet Source; Mic Seaton, Sr. UI/UX Designer
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.
Seeking 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, St. Vladimir's engaged Promet Source in a Discovery Workshop, followed by a redesign and redevelopment of it's Drupal 6 CMS.
While the previous site, 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.
About the project
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.
- Mobile responsiveness -- a significant imperative due to the fact that 60 percent of visitors accessed the site from a mobile device.
Promet's Provus platform allowed for drag-and-drop, no-code content editing, enabling flexibility in building and revising sections, along with functionality that allowed for the presentation of great lengths of content in a compact, approachable format.
A sharp focus on content strategy, user journeys of distinct persona groups, and clean pathways streamlined navigation within a user experience that has proven to be inherently more inviting.
Navigation that’s better aligned with the needs of specific persona groups, along with more prominent calls to action have served to align the site with specific goals for fundraising, recruitment, connecting, and community building.
Upgrading to Drupal 8.9 created a UX foundation that functioned equally well on mobile and desktop.
Why Drupal was chosen
The existing site, built in 2010, was on Drupal 6. A migration to Drupal 8.9 was determined to be the optimal and most efficient solution to the full scope of St. Vladimir's current and anticipated future needs.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
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.
