Putting the gigs first for a Richmond live music venue
The Leadbeater Hotel is a Richmond pub with a 350-capacity band room behind the front bar. The website needed to work the way the venue does. Gigs upfront, food obvious, bookings easy. We rebuilt it in Webflow around a gig guide that feeds itself from the ticketing system, so the site stays current without anyone touching it.
Overview
The challenge
A venue site has one job that never stops: this week's gigs. The Leadbeater runs a full calendar, and every show a visitor cannot find is a ticket not sold. Keeping listings current by hand is exactly the kind of job that slips on a busy week, and a gig guide that has fallen behind is worse than none.
The site also had to carry everything else the pub sells. Table bookings, function enquiries for the band room and the upstairs space, the food menu and the weekly specials all needed an obvious route, on a phone, for someone deciding where to go tonight.
And it had to feel like the Leadbeater. The venue trades on indie-punk energy and a loyal local crowd. A generic hospitality template would have thrown that away.
Our approach
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Strategy
The structure follows what a visitor comes to do, in order: find a gig, book a table, see the food, hire a space.
- Events lead the homepage, fed live from ticketing rather than maintained by hand
- One booking route per job: tables, functions, and bands looking to play, each with its own path
- Food made unmissable: the menu and the weekly specials sit one tap from anywhere
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Design
The design carries the venue's own personality instead of borrowing one.
- Hand-drawn display type over real gig photography, not stock
- Motion used sparingly to give the page energy without slowing it down
- Mobile-first throughout, because deciding where to go tonight happens on a phone
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Development
Built in Webflow, wired to the systems the venue already runs on.
- Gig cards render straight from the Oztix event feed, with search and pagination
- Table bookings hand off to the venue’s reservation system
- Band bookings arrive through a structured form that asks for what the booker actually needs
Technical deep-dive
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A gig guide that runs itself
The events grid is a live integration with Oztix, the venue's ticketing platform, so the site and the box office can never disagree.
- Event cards pull artwork, dates and ticket links straight from the Oztix feed
- Visitors can search and page through the full listing, with a loading state that never shows a blank grid
- Every ticket click is tagged, so the venue can see what its own site drives
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Three booking routes, none shared
A table for four, a function for seventy and a band chasing a slot are different enquiries, and mixing them makes work for staff.
- Table bookings hand off to the reservation platform, with group limits and after-hours contact stated
- Function enquiries route by size, so large bookings go straight to the right inbox
- The band room and the 70-patron upstairs space each presented with their real capacities
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Bands treated as an audience
Venues need acts as much as punters, so playing here has its own page rather than a buried email address.
- A submission form asks for music links, lineup and draw, which is what the booker assesses
- Venue specifications are one click away for touring acts
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A brand-true build that stays fast
Personality costs nothing if the page still loads quickly and reads cleanly.
- Hand-drawn headings and photography carry the venue’s character
- On-page SEO structure so gig and venue searches find the right pages
Results and impact
The venue's website now does its highest-value job without anyone maintaining it. The gig guide is always current because it comes from the ticketing system, and every path a visitor might want, a ticket, a table, a function, a slot on stage, starts on the first screen.
Staff keep working in the tools they already use. Oztix stays the source of truth for events and the reservation platform for tables, and the website reflects both instead of duplicating either.
Key takeaway
For a live music venue, the website is a gig guide first and a brochure second. Wiring the events grid to the ticketing system meant the site stopped being a maintenance job and started being the venue's best promoter. The rest is making sure that when someone is deciding what to do tonight, every answer the pub has is on the first screen.
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