With the opening of an exciting new library and learning complex less than a year away, Seminary of the Southwest spent the Spring and Summer of 2022 preparing for the new look on campus by creating a new look in the Southwest digital space. As students, faculty, staff gathered for the Fall, 2002, semester at Southwest, they were greeted with a new-look custom- designed website. A few weeks later, Southwest released its newest promotional video, ‘One Seminary: A Diversity of Vocations of Service.’
“The culture of innovation that permeates Southwest is always stimulating,” said Eric Scott, Vice President for Communications and Marketing. “But being the innovative seminary that we are presents a real communications challenge: how do we share these multiple transformational offerings with our alumni, our friends, and the greater church when there is so much to convey?”
The new video seeks to highlight a question at the core of the Southwest identity: how does a traditional residential theological formation program blend with a cutting-edge counseling degree and local formation program to work together to become more than the sum of their parts?
“Video is a powerful tool for communication,” said the Very Rev. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Dean and President. “Our uniqueness sets us apart, and it requires the right context to truly share who we are at Seminary of the Southwest. Our communications department has done an outstanding job of creating that context in this video and redesigned website.”
The newly designed website also seeks to be the type of tool required to catalog and share the diverse academic offerings and formation opportunities from Southwest, as well as the rich and impactful stories of life among the Southwest community. Undergoing its first major renovation since mobile platform became ubiquitous, the main goals of the rebuild were to improve the mobile platform and search functionality, create more fluidity on the home page, improve interaction with livestream, video, and other expression-related content, and to be a better device for Southwest’s most effective tool for promotion, story-telling.
“We spent well over a year developing this website, as we knew that level of intentional focus would be required to build something meaningful now and into the future,” said Scott. “Among the many lessons learned from the pandemic was how important it is to have a nimble and responsive digital platform. This is true in academics, this is true in the church, and frankly, this is true everywhere.”
To explore Southwest’s new website, please visit ssw.edu.
