Kristine Horten, Realtor
A custom WordPress theme, a simple property listings system and a blog built for search and AI answers, for a Central Pennsylvania real estate agent.
About the Client
We country people are weird. This client and I have lived two properties down from each other for over 8 years, and it took a website to bring us together. But I’m glad it did!
Kristine Horten is an Associate Broker and Office Manager at Bowen Agency Realtors in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where she helps buyers, sellers and investors across the Susquehanna Valley.
The Problem
Kristine had some downtime from work coming up, and she wanted to use it to start blogging about real estate. Her goal was to improve reach and authority: she wanted to show up in search, and when people ask an AI about real estate services in the region, she wanted a better chance of being part of the answer.
She tried building a website herself on WordPress.com and got stuck, and she made the decision to “make it right” before she started blogging on top of it.
The Job
- Get the site working again.
- Give the site a professional polish while honoring agency guidelines.
- Make it fast, gorgeous, and responsive.
- Let her manage the blog and property listings herself.
- Teach her how to use it effectively.
The Solution
Kristine was open to switching platforms, but after learning about her needs, WordPress.com still felt like the right home for her site. It just needed some help.
Getting the site working again
Essentially, the site had a bare bones theme that didn’t render a header, footer, or any kind of navigation. While applying a different theme would have “made it work” based on other project requirements, we decided to go a step further and create a new custom theme for the client.
Give the site a professional polish while honoring agency guidelines
We created a new custom theme that works with WordPress’s Full Site Editing capabilities. CCG Labs (well, the people that make up CCG Labs) have built many real estate sites and have a good understanding of what is required, and we combined this with the unique requirement that this site in particular is not for an agency, but for a specific agent within the agency that’s trying to stand out.
Her site makes it very clear and easy how to contact her, and has a working contact form and click-to-call phone links. It highlights Kristine, her experience and expertise while honoring branding requirements from her agency that require specific colors and fonts and keeping agency contact info more prominent than personal contact info.
It also ties Kristine, and her website to a specific service area where she
does business using photography of familiar locations, good alt text on the
photography, and utilizing locality keywords in content.
Make it fast, gorgeous, and responsive
WordPress is not the solution to every web problem. But when someone actually wants to blog and manage their own site content, it’s a good solution.
But when I build a WordPress site, I have strong opinions about how you should, or should not, go about that. Lots of designers, developers, and agencies will immediately reach for a bloated theme or site builder plugin, such as Divi or Elementor. In reality, modern WordPress gives an experienced developer just about everything they need to build a highly customized site that is fast, lean, and still reasonably easy for a client to build content on.
We did this by building a minimal Custom Theme that implements our vision for the website. Authors manage their page and blog content using WordPress’s built-in block editor. We went the extra mile to ensure that all of WordPress’s built-in blocks render well in the custom theme and look consistent with the client’s branding guidelines.
We even shipped with a “kitchen sink” demo page that demonstrates how to use all of the built-in blocks!
- Speed: We kept it fast by building on top of what WordPress already gives us, rather than by installing a bunch of plugin bloat. The new site gets 95-100% on Google Lighthouse performance tests.
- Gorgeous: We designed the new theme based off of examples of some of our favorite real estate agent websites, combined with an extended version of the agency’s color scheme, and an elegant font solution combining a serif for headings and sans serif font for body copy.
- Responsive: We design and build with cross-device compatibility baked in, so the new theme looks great on a variety of form factors and loads quickly whether you’re on desktop, mobile, or somewhere in between. We use automated testing, including using our in-house open source CCG Labs Site Reviewer tool to constantly stress-test changes to ensure every page remains working correctly and efficiently as we make changes.
Let her manage the blog and property listings herself
Blogging functionality is baked into WordPress. We simply had to ensure that the new theme rendered both individual blog entries and the blog listing page in alignment with our vision, and that the pages also associated Kristine’s image and contact information with each post that she authors.
For property listings there was a bit more work to do, but nothing we haven’t done before.
I’ve built a lot of real estate websites, and there are plenty of chances to get clever with it:
- MLS integrations
- Integrations with aggregators like Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com
The point of this site isn’t to recreate what her agency’s website and the MLS already provide. It’s to improve her personal online brand. So instead of an integration, we built a custom content type for properties, with a gorgeous view of what she has for sale. It’s simple for her to manage, and when we pointed an AI agent at her MLS links, it was able to add them to WordPress pretty seamlessly.
In other words: her site sets her up to work smart, not hard by leveraging ChatGPT to copy listings from her MLS to her site in the future.
Teach her how to use it effectively
While we don’t do this for just any client, Kristine specifically asked for some training as part of the package. Given that I can walk out my front door and see her house, this was a pretty easy request to honor.
I gave Kristine about an hour of face-to-face training on WordPress. We covered the specific things that she wants to be able to do independently, like write blog posts, add and remove property listings, and maybe change what’s on the primary navigation from time to time. I taught her how to use the block editor and the custom properties we applied to the new custom post type.
I also included a 20 page User’s Guide for her website that explains, in detail, how to manage all of the parts of her website that she’s going to want to manage independently.
The role of AI on this project
I make a big deal about how I use AI in my process, because it’s a big deal to me. I don’t want to deliver lazy, insecure, or inauthentic work for my clients. I want to build sites that put their best foot forward in all respects. But I also want to be able to serve clients that don’t have the budget for the agency white-glove approach.
Using AI agents to do the grunt-work gets me there. I use my decades of expertise to tell the tools what to do, and how to do it. They don’t replace my brain, they replace my fingers on the keyboard.
Using AI agents (Claude Code, specifically) as a tool on this project empowered me to do what used to be several weeks of focused work in a few days, and at a lower cost than I could have charged for an equivalent project just a few years ago. Kristine first contacted me on October 14, 2026. We launched on October 19, and not with a quick, lazy, template based site but with a fully custom theme optimized for the client’s needs, performance, device support, and great baselines for SEO and AI discovery.