Northern Seminary | Our Work

Challenge

Northern Seminary is a leading institution for seminary education. For more than 100 years, they have been preparing students for a life of service in the church and throughout the world. Located in Lisle, Illinois, Northern Seminary provides seminary education, theological and biblical training, and spiritual leadership development to students on campus or online.

Before coming to our team at Webfitters for a new website, they were trying to manage three separate Northern Seminary websites: one for students, one for alumni, and one for prospective students or other visitors looking for information.

The use of three websites was problematic because it made navigation confusing for visitors and often interrupted user flow – which is critical for keeping users engaged and coming back. On the back end, the mass amounts of data became overwhelming and the sitemaps slowly started to become unorganized.

Consistent branding throughout the three sites also started to suffer as more information was being uploaded to each site over the years. When the team at Northern Seminary began to realize that maintaining three websites was becoming unsustainable, they reached out to our team for help.

Solution

With the challenge of merging three sites ahead of us, our team got to work right away. To start, we worked with their team to update the look of the website, identify a new primary menu and determine features and forms that would be needed throughout the site.

From there we sat down with Northern Seminary to identify how to best consolidate their content, and which content absolutely needed to be moved over.

Creating a new website was a great opportunity for their team to sort through and remove any content that wasn’t serving their message or outdated content that would only bog down their new website.

We also worked on optimizing the content that was brought over: introducing relevant keywords and search queries that would benefit their SEO, implementing correct headers and titles, and creating unique metadata for each page.

Our developers crafted interactive directories to help improve the flow of content on the site and the overall user experience for visitors. Now, Faculty and Program directories can be filtered so visitors can easily find exactly what they’re looking for, making the site more user friendly.

We also introduced categories to their ‘News & Updates’ page so prospective students and other visitors can read staff, student and alumni stories, the latest happenings on campus, and other news. An event calendar that showcases Northern Seminary’s upcoming lectures, commencement ceremonies and more, was also integrated into the site.

Now, Northern Seminary has one cohesive, uniformly branded website, providing alumni, current and prospective students, and other visitors with an engaging experience tailored to expanding their understanding of seminary education.

Congratulations again to the team at Northern Seminary. We are looking forward to their growth in the online space as they continue to invest in their future!

We created value for Northern Seminary by consolidating and optimizing content, and strategically identifying a user experience that would serve their audience. We can do that for you too. Learn more about what a new or redesigned website would look like for your business.