Bellum Property Management

Bellum Property Management is the corporate website of a company that manages homeowners associations (HOAs) and condominiums across Richmond and Northern Virginia. It speaks to a specific audience, the members of association boards, and has one clear commercial goal: getting a board to request a management proposal. Visitors can explore the services (financial management, full-service management, developer transition and consulting), review insurance coverage with the company's insurance partners, and read the 24/7 emergency protocol and a resource library for boards. At the center of the site is a new-client questionnaire with per-field validation that collects the community's details, number of units, service type and the requester's role on the board. From the navigation bar, users reach the client's external systems: the resident portal, the resale documents service and the company's financial management site. The project started from an unusual situation: there was no source code, only the compiled production bundle. The work was to recover it, migrate it, audit it, redesign it completely and make it indexable, without taking the live site down.

The client had inherited a Create React App site that existed only as a build: a minified bundle and its source maps, served as-is from the root of the repository. The styles carried hidden defects (CSS variables that did not exist, CSS Modules rules leaking out and overriding the typography of the whole site, a fixed-position navbar that broke apart) and SEO was almost absent: all six routes shared the same title, the description was the framework default, there was no robots.txt, the sitemap returned the app's HTML, and any invented URL answered 200. The solution was to rebuild the source from the source maps and move it onto Vite 5, which first required turning webpack-only inline require() calls into ESM imports so the app would render at all. An audit with targeted fixes followed, then a complete redesign on a custom design system with color tokens, fluid typography with clamp(), spacing and shadows. For SEO, the site gained per-route metadata through a dependency-free component, a real sitemap and robots.txt served as static files ahead of the single-page rewrite, ProfessionalService structured data and a noindex 404 page that ends soft 404s. Before the redesign, a design exploration produced eight distinct directions plus two refined variants. The chosen one, "Cornerstone", is an editorial, surveyor's-studio aesthetic (Newsreader serif, IBM Plex Mono, a forest green and bronze palette) applied across every page.