Searstone is a retirement community located in Cary, North Carolina, offering continuing care retirement community (CCRC) services including independent living, assisted living, and skilled nursing care. The project involved developing a WordPress site with custom PHP while consulting with the team at LevLane, a Philadelphia-based advertising agency that managed several retirement community accounts.
CCRC retirement communities present a more complex informational challenge than single-tier independent living communities — prospective residents and their families need to understand multiple levels of care, pricing and contract models, and how the community supports residents through different stages of aging. The site needed to present this range of services and living options in a structured, accessible way.
Custom PHP development was a component of the project alongside the WordPress theme build, indicating functionality beyond what standard WordPress plugins or themes provide out of the box. For a retirement community site, custom PHP might support inquiry form handling, custom database queries for amenity or pricing data, or integration with a CRM for lead management — functionality that requires code outside the standard WordPress content management framework.
The Searstone project was one of several retirement community sites developed through the LevLane consulting relationship, alongside Ventana, Legacy at Mills River, Retire at Berry, and Ventana by Buckner. The recurring engagement with LevLane's retirement community clients created consistency in the development approach while each community's distinct location, service model, and brand required individual theming decisions.
