Forgotten Weapons

Forgotten Weapons features collectible, unusual, rare, prototype and just plain interesting historic and modern firearms. The site is run by Ian McCollum and includes companion Full30, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages. Since 2010, Ian has amassed a prodigious collection of photos, videos and text documentation of a wide array of firearms.

It is undeniable that Forgotten Weapons is one of the premier sites on the internet for historic firearm information. Unfortunately, the site presentation left a little to be desired. The site used a theme that had been abandoned by the developer some time ago (and it showed). Installing a new theme and doing a little tweaking of the content resulted in a much cleaner and appealing presentation of the site content.

The MH Magazine theme allows for the home page to be divided into sections for the site’s latest posts overall as well as those from specific post categories. This allows site visitors to more easily see at a glance the newest posts for all categories as well as those for specific categories; this prevents content for less frequently updated post categories from being buried far down the list of overall latest posts.

In addition, MH Magazine is a “responsive” theme which allows the site page layout to be optimized “on the fly” for reduced screen size devices such as phones and tablets. In today’s connected world, it is critical to be able to present your content effectively on reduced screen size devices.

AdRotate was utilized to allow scheduling and tracking of ads while WooCommerce, the most popular e-commerce solution on the internet, can implement an online store when needed (Ian is currently using BBTV to sell his merchandise). Finally, Post Type Switcher is a utility for converting WordPress pages to posts or vice versa, simply and easily. For Ian, the main attraction of Post Type Switcher is the ability to convert a page to a post and retain all comments; Ian has significant content originally published as a page that better fits in the current website as a post. Post Type Switcher makes the conversion of page to post as simple as a click.

The updated site will allow Ian to present his content in a more accessible way and hopefully lead to increased traffic to his website.