Union Presbyterian Seminary Website Refresh
In education, your website is the first place students find you. Stud
(And how to apply!)
My work with Union Presbyterian Seminary was to create, re-write, and optimize the content across their expansive website. Sometimes organizations get lost in the sheer amount of pages they have and fail to realize that they’re missing key pages that their student body are looking for. Sometimes you just need a fresh set of eyes to make what you already have shine. Sometimes, you’re starting from the ground up. Either way, I’m here to help.
Previous layout
& copy.
Union Presbyterian Seminary's goal with their website launch was to increase admissions and launch their new programming. This required an overhaul. The website was a mess of tabs and nested pages that contained somehow too much and not enough information.
A key part of my meetings with stakeholders was pulling the key information that was buried deep in nested pages to the forefront and creating a structure for that information to be laid out.
The admissions tab is the clearest example I have of how writing with clear intent matters. Good writing allows for good web designers to shine.
New layout.
What to do when you’re saying too much and nothing at all:
Sharing a long and storied legacy.
Writing focused on clarity and transparency of the past: and, honoring the work done to do better.
Telling complex stories.
Another massive undertaking of this project was to tell Union Presbyterian's history in a way that acknowledged the story of UPSem en total.
The historical record was broken down into a mess of links to pages that contained massive pages of text. While the work did acknowledge the historical context of UPSem, the Seminary wanted to ensure that it didn’t feel like the history of UPSem was being hidden behind a series of links.
Previous layout
& copy.
New layout.
As a copywriter with a degree in Rhetoric, I found the challenge of creating a full timeline of an organization that was founded in 1812 invigorating. The work was highly technical and required a rigid focus on telling the Seminary’s history in context, without creating the justification of “it was just a different time”. One of the key takeaways in the stakeholder meetings was that the Seminary had taken real steps to create change in Richmond after the Reconstruction era into the Civil Rights era and to now.