Rebuilding EBAYONET, a bayonet catalogue online since 2000

Dennis “Otto” Ottobre sells collectable bayonets and edged militaria, every piece photographed in hand and numbered. We moved his hand-coded site to WordPress with a custom theme and catalogue plugin, and gave collectors search, filters and a real page for every item.

ClientEBAYONET.com
IndustryCollectable militaria
ProjectSite rebuild and catalogue migration
Pieces migrated825
Live siteebayonet.com
The new EBAYONET homepage: a catalogue-first layout with search, a featured piece and country shortcuts The old ebayonet.com homepage: centered red and purple headings on a plain white page
The ebayonet.com homepage before and after. Drag across the screenshot to compare. Same domain, same dealer, same item numbers.

Great inventory, hard to find

Every piece Otto sells is photographed in hand and given an item number. Collectors quote that number when they write, and some have been doing it for twenty years.

Getting to a piece was the hard part. The old hand-coded site split the catalogue into five alphabetical country pages. Each item was a paragraph of text, a list of raw photo links and a price. There was no search, no filtering, no page for a single item, and nothing that worked well on a phone.

What Otto asked for

Keep the domain, the item numbers and the photograph-everything policy. Move the whole catalogue. Break nothing.

The old catalogue page: item descriptions, each followed by a list of raw photo links and a price
The old Afghanistan to France page. Every item looked like this, one after another.

Built around how Otto sells

Off-the-shelf shop software expects stock you can reorder. Otto sells one of each, by inquiry. So we built the site around the catalogue and the item number.

  • A custom WordPress theme that works on phones, tablets and desktops
  • A catalogue plugin that holds every item, photo, price and country, managed from the dashboard
  • All 825 pieces migrated, each with its original item number
  • Search by keyword, item number, model or marking, with category and country filters
  • A page for every piece, with a photo gallery and a button that copies the item number
  • An inquiry form that fills in the item number, so every message says which piece it’s about
A new item page: M1917 bayonet with scabbard, item 19045, with a photo gallery, the price and an Ask about item 19045 button

Around the new site

The catalogue, the new stock on the homepage, and the same catalogue on a phone.

What changed for collectors

And for Otto, who no longer edits HTML to add a bayonet.

Old site
New site
Finding a piece
Scroll through five alphabetical country pages
Search by keyword, item number, model or marking
Browsing
By country only
Filter by category and country, sorted newest first
Photos
A list of raw .jpg links under each item
A gallery on every item page
Asking about an item
Write an email and type the item number yourself
An inquiry form with the item number already filled in
On a phone
Desktop pages, pinch and zoom
Laid out for phones, tablets and desktops
Adding new stock
Edit the HTML by hand
Add the item from the WordPress dashboard

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Have an older site doing the heavy lifting?

We rebuild established sites without breaking what already works: custom themes, purpose-built plugins and careful migrations onto a platform you can run yourself.