The challenge
SYNC had built a real following in Birmingham on the strength of the nights themselves — but everything about the brand lived inside Instagram. Dates went out in stories that disappear after 24 hours, tickets sat on Skiddle behind a link in bio, and the mailing list was a spreadsheet somebody had to type into by hand after every event. Nothing was searchable, nothing was permanent, and nothing carried the artwork that sells these nights in the first place.
The approach
The posters are the brand, so the whole site was designed around them. Every date leads with its artwork, counts down to doors, and ends in one tap to tickets. Behind that, the jobs that were eating the promoter’s time — collecting signups, chasing them into a spreadsheet — were built to run on their own.
What I built
- Poster-led event listings — upcoming dates and a past-events archive, each one leading with the full artwork rather than a cropped thumbnail.
- A live countdown to doors on the home page, next to the poster and the ticket link.
- Direct Skiddle ticketing, with the promoter’s rep tag carried intact through the redirect so every sale is still credited to them.
- A mailing list that fills itself — name, email, phone and postcode go straight into the client’s Google Sheet through a serverless function. No exports, no inbox to check, and duplicate emails are skipped automatically.
- Their existing list migrated in — 176 signups brought across from the old spreadsheet and merged with the new ones, so there’s one list rather than two.
- Event structured data so Google can show the date, venue, ticket price and age policy directly in search results.
- Built mobile-first, because almost all of the traffic arrives from an Instagram link on a phone.
The part nobody sees
Moving the domain onto new hosting knocked out the client’s email — the nameserver change had replaced the whole DNS zone, taking the mail records with it. I rebuilt the MX, SPF and DKIM records from scratch and verified the DKIM key byte-for-byte against what their mail provider had issued, so sending and receiving came back without the site ever going down.
The result
SYNC now has a permanent home that looks like the nights do, where every date is a page that can be found on Google and shared anywhere, and where the ticket link and the mailing list run without anyone touching them. The promoter posts the poster; the site does the rest.
This is the kind of build I do for clubs, venues, festivals, promoters and collectives. And you’d see a free preview of yours before paying a cent.