Gun Boss
A 5-section editorial dark-mode site for an independent Bullhead City firearms shop — built on Astro 6 with a complete GunStore JSON-LD schema, perfect 400/400 PageSpeed across mobile and desktop, and store-visit CTAs engineered for the local Map Pack.
Visit Live Site
The Challenge
Gun Boss is an independent, family-owned firearms shop in Bullhead City, Arizona — co-owned by Dee Taylor, a 15-year industry veteran featured in Our Town magazine's "Women in Business." The shop carries handguns, rifles, ammunition, optics, knives, and EDC gear, and handles buy/sell/trade, consignment, and FFL transfers. Their existing web presence had to do something most firearms sites cannot: communicate trust, surface inventory range, anchor the business in local search across an eight-city Tri-State service area, and drive in-person store visits — without ever attempting an online firearms sale. The job was bigger than "a marketing site." It was a Google Business anchor, a credibility statement, and a wayfinding tool, all at once. It had to look as serious as the shop floor it represented, load instantly on a phone in cellular dead zones along Highway 95, and feed Google's local algorithm the structured data needed to rank in the Map Pack against larger regional competitors. And it had to do all of that while remaining dark-only by design — no white-on-white compromise, no template aesthetic, no generic firearms-shop look.
Our Solution
We built Gun Boss on Astro 6 with Tailwind CSS v4, Motion, and a fully static output deployed to Render via Blueprint IaC. The 5-section editorial composition — Hero, Story, Carry, Inside, FAQ, Visit — was designed as a single scroll narrative anchored by an LCP-preloaded hero slideshow of the storefront and shop interior. The design system is dark-only, built on a custom token palette (obsidian, gunmetal, slate, steel, parchment, bone, brass, oxblood, flag-blue) where pure white is forbidden on the rendered page. Display type is Cormorant Garamond, body is Inter, monospace is JetBrains Mono — preloaded through Astro's font provider with subsetting and zero CLS. The brass accent ("shell brass") signals premium; oxblood drives every CTA. Total client-side JavaScript ships under 50 KB gzipped — the View Transitions ClientRouter (~5.5 KB) plus a Lightbox/parallax bundle (~4.8 KB), with the slideshow and Visit map scripts inlined. The site enforces a strict performance budget: Hero LCP under 2 seconds on Fast 3G, CLS under 0.05, INP under 200 ms. Scroll-driven animations use the modern `animation-timeline` property gated behind `@supports`, with full `prefers-reduced-motion` neutralization. The structured data layer is where local SEO is won: a complete GunStore JSON-LD graph with full NAP, GeoCoordinates, Google FTID-backed `hasMap` reference, per-day `OpeningHoursSpecification` derived from a single source of truth, `areaServed` across all eight Tri-State corridor cities (Bullhead City, Fort Mohave, Mohave Valley, Golden Valley, Kingman, Laughlin, Needles, Lake Havasu City), `makesOffer` for each product category, `knowsAbout` topics, and `sameAs` social links — all linked to a Person schema for co-owner Dee Taylor and a FAQPage schema whose `mainEntity` is sourced from the same FAQ array that renders the visible accordion, eliminating the text drift Google penalizes. The site is wired tight to Google Business: matching NAP everywhere, the canonical FTID embedded in the Maps URL, and a mobile sticky "Get Directions" bar that upgrades to a `maps://` deep link on iOS and a `geo:` intent on Android once `navigator.userAgent` is readable — keeping a one-tap path from search result to turn-by-turn navigation. Every CTA — "Come Visit Us," "See What We Have In Our Shop," the phone number, the directions bar — points to the physical store, not a checkout. The masonry gallery layers a pointer-parallax effect that tracks the cursor as a CSS custom property, the lightbox runs a focus trap with Motion-driven mini-springs, and the Visit section lazy-loads the Google Maps embed only after intersection. The site is dark-mode-only by design — `prefers-color-scheme` is intentionally ignored.
Results
Gun Boss launched at gunboss.org with a perfect 400/400 Google Lighthouse score — 100 in Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO, across both mobile and desktop. The hero slideshow lights up in under 2 seconds on a throttled Fast 3G connection, the entire site weighs less than a single WordPress admin bundle, and there is zero render-blocking JavaScript anywhere in the critical path. The structured data is comprehensive enough that Google's Map Pack can match the business against "gun store Bullhead City," "FFL transfers Kingman," "firearms shop Laughlin," and every long-tail variant across the eight-city service area, with the Person schema linking Dee Taylor's credentials directly to the business entity. The site has no database, no admin panel, no plugins, no CMS — every page is pre-rendered HTML served from a global CDN. Content updates ship through Git in under sixty seconds. The mobile "Get Directions" CTA hands off directly to Apple Maps or Google Maps with one tap. The FAQ schema is locked to the visible accordion so Google sees the exact same answers the customer reads. The result is a marketing site that looks like a magazine spread, performs like a static text file, and works like a Google Business storefront extension — converting search-result curiosity into shop-floor foot traffic.
Technologies Used
Want results like these?
Tell us about your project and we will show you what we can build.