Lore

Homestead Preserve

Been getting some buzz recently on our new site for Homestead Preserve, and I wanted to share it with anyone who may have missed it. Homestead Preserve is a community in Bath County, Virginia that is situated near the famous Homestead Resort. The amount of land is immense. In fact, out of the over 11,500 acres that comprise the property, a little over 9,000 are forever entrusted to The Nature Conservancy. All of those numbers add up to some seriously pristine countryside, amazing views, and some gorgeous homes.

There’s a couple things that are unique to the Homestead Preserve website:

So many real estate search implementations assume the user wants a similar experience to visiting a broker’s MLS website. It’s utilitarian, and it’s also a bit cold. Instead, we chose to ease the prospective homebuyer into the process by breaking down the search first into location (Hot Springs and Warm Springs), then by Property Type, then Neighborhood, and finally if they can’t make up their mind – by Home and Homesite.

We threw in photos, maps, and a bit of descriptive writing into each to help the user make their choice. The end result is a softer searching experience that should ultimately be more relevant for users.


Most communities start out with a story about a dream, where words and renderings paint a picture of what will come. The Homestead Preserve site takes a different tack and spreads stories throughout the site of what is going on there right now. We do that with an integrated blog and posts that are flagged by category and automatically driven to specific sections and pages of the website. Real photos will always trump a rendering, and constantly updated posts tell the story of a vibrant community with lots of things to do.

The thing that really warms our heart is that early in the website development process, the Homestead Preserve team actually met as a group of 6+ people and came up with a list of topics for the blog that spans over 4 pages long and then assigned writing tasks for individual topics to each other. We were blown away by the eagerness to do this, and look forward to a steady stream of blog chatter throughout the year.

There is much more than just this, and thanks to the Homestead Preserve and Celebration Associates team for their awesome insight and help putting together a really fantastic website – go check it all out for yourself at www.homesteadpreserve.com