A heritage gunsmith shop, given the website its work deserves.
A custom WordPress theme built for a one-shop rifle builder in southeastern Idaho. Calm, modern brochure with hardened security and full legal scaffolding. Built to last as long as the rifles do.
View the live site ↗Build state at launch.
A small, durable build with the security and legal posture a regulated industry expects. Live metrics will be added once the site has been indexed long enough to measure them honestly.
An older site that didn’t match the work.
Western Pursuit is a custom rifle shop in Preston, Idaho. Joe Agee builds precision rifles by hand. The kind of work that takes weeks per gun and shows in every detail. The old site told none of that story. It looked like a template, read like a generic firearms catalog, and gave a serious buyer no reason to believe the work was any different from what they would get from a mass-market retailer.
The brief was specific. A clean, modern brochure site that signals craftsmanship before it signals retail. Five pages, no e-commerce, no FFL transfer workflow. The shop runs that side of the business in person and on the phone, the way Joe wants it. The site exists to bring serious inquiries in, not to process transactions.
Reference brands Joe pointed to were the names every precision rifle builder respects: Jarrett Rifles, Seekins Precision, AllTerra Arms, Christensen Arms, Mac Bros, OM Rifles. The target visual language was their world. Confident, plainspoken, unpretentious. Not the louder, tactical-styled corner of the firearms web.
Custom WordPress theme. Lightweight stack. Hardened by default.
WordPress was the right platform because Joe wanted to edit copy and swap photos without a developer in the loop. But the way WordPress is usually delivered, with Elementor or Divi over WooCommerce over a Cloudways stack, is the opposite of what this shop needed. Page builders break under their own weight, plugin sprawl creates an attack surface, and the result feels generic regardless of the theme.
So the build is a custom theme. Hand-written PHP templates over Advanced Custom Fields Free. Every editable region is an ACF block in the admin. No page builder. No bloated theme framework. The plugin list is short and every one earns its slot: ACF, CF7 with Conditional Fields, Akismet, Cloudflare Turnstile, Yoast SEO, Really Simple Security, Limit Login Attempts, Smush, WP Mail SMTP, Classic Editor.
Security got the same attention as design. XML-RPC disabled. Author enumeration blocked. WordPress version stripped from the head and from asset URLs. Security response headers configured at the WP level: X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy. HSTS handled at the Cloudflare edge.
Three legal pages (Privacy, Terms of Use, Legal & Compliance) were drafted in parallel with the build and published at launch. The Legal & Compliance page covers the FFL-specific surface the firearms industry requires: transfer rules, buyer responsibility, age requirements, NFA handling, build deposits, ATF cooperation, manufacturer warranties.