Building a Bar Website That Doesn't Suck
Say you’re opening a neighborhood bar. You’ve got the perfect location, the vintage industrial aesthetic is dialed in, and your cocktail menu is finally dialed. But your website? That’s where things get messy.
You could hire an agency. They’ll build you something beautiful in Webflow or WordPress, charge you five figures, and hand over a site that loads like it’s 2005. Or you could grab a template from ThemeForest, but then you’re stuck with whatever generic design they give you, bloated with jQuery plugins you’ll never use, and good luck trying to change the color scheme without breaking everything.
Wait, WTF?
There’s got to be a better way.
The Problem with Modern Web Development
Here’s what happens when you build a typical bar website today:
First, you install React because that’s what everyone uses. Then you need Tailwind for styling, but wait—Tailwind doesn’t have components, so you grab a UI library like Chakra or Material-UI. Your hero section needs animations, so you add Framer Motion. The gallery needs a lightbox, so you install yet another dependency. Before you know it, your package.json looks like a pharmacy receipt and your bundle size is measured in megabytes.
But here’s the thing: a bar website isn’t a web application. It doesn’t need real-time updates. It doesn’t need complex state management. It doesn’t need 47 different JavaScript frameworks. It needs to load fast, look good, and tell people when you’re open and what you serve.
What if we thought about this differently?
Enter the Quiet Bar Template
Instead of asking “what frameworks should I use?”, ask “what’s the minimum viable website that actually works?”
The Quiet Bar template takes this to its logical extreme: one dependency. Not “one framework and its ecosystem.” Not “one meta-framework that bundles everything.” Just Astro. That’s it.
Here’s the dependency graph:
quiet-bar/
└── astro (and that's literally it)No Tailwind. No React. No component libraries. No animation frameworks. No lightbox plugins. Just pure HTML, CSS, and a sprinkle of vanilla JavaScript where it actually makes sense.
Why This Works (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Static Sites)
Let’s talk about what a bar website actually needs to do:
- Load instantly - Because nobody waits 3 seconds to see your menu
- Work on phones - Because that’s where your customers are
- Show up in search - Because “bars near me” is how people find you
- Display information - Hours, location, menu, that’s pretty much it
Notice what’s not on that list? Complex interactivity. Real-time updates. State management. Dynamic routing. All the things that modern web frameworks are optimized for.
So why are we using tools designed for Facebook-scale applications to build what amounts to a digital business card?
The Beauty of Constraints
By intentionally limiting ourselves to just Astro, we get some interesting properties:
Performance becomes trivial. No JavaScript to bundle means no bundle splitting strategies to optimize. No CSS framework means no unused style purging. The browser downloads HTML and CSS, renders it, and we’re done.
Customization becomes obvious. Want to change the color scheme? Edit the CSS custom properties. Want to add a section? Copy an existing component and modify it. Everything is just HTML and CSS—technologies that have been stable for decades.
Maintenance becomes non-existent. No dependency updates to manage. No breaking changes in framework APIs. No security vulnerabilities in third-party packages. The site you build today will still work in five years.
Content Management for People Who Hate CMSs
Traditional wisdom says you need a CMS for a business website. Customers need to update their hours, menu, photos—surely they can’t be editing code?
But here’s what actually happens: Your bar owner friend opens WordPress, clicks around for 20 minutes trying to find where to edit the hours, accidentally changes the theme, and calls you in a panic.
The Quiet Bar approach: Everything lives in one JSON file. Want to update the hours? Edit the JSON. Change the menu? Edit the JSON. Add a photo? Drop it in the folder and reference it in the JSON.
It’s so simple it almost feels like cheating:
{
"name": "The Quiet Bar",
"openingHours": {
"weekday": "Mon – Thu: 5:00 PM – 1:00 AM",
"weekend": "Fri – Sun: 3:00 PM – 2:00 AM"
},
"menu": [
{
"category": "Drafts",
"items": [
{ "name": "House Lager", "description": "Crisp and refreshing" }
]
}
]
}The Gallery Problem
Every bar website needs a photo gallery. Every template handles this by installing a lightbox library. But here’s what a lightbox actually needs to do:
- Show a thumbnail
- When clicked, show the full image
- Have previous/next buttons
- Close when you press escape
That’s maybe 50 lines of JavaScript. But instead we pull in a library that handles every possible use case, adds its own CSS framework, and comes with a bundle size measured in kilobytes.
The Quiet Bar template just… writes those 50 lines. No dependencies. No configuration. No learning a new API. Just vanilla JavaScript that does exactly what we need and nothing more.
Responsive Design Without Frameworks
“But Tailwind makes responsive design easy!” they say. Does it, though?
Here’s the responsive design strategy for the Quiet Bar template:
/* Mobile first */
.hours-grid {
display: grid;
gap: 2rem;
}
/* Tablet */
@media (min-width: 768px) {
.hours-grid {
grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr;
}
}
/* Desktop */
@media (min-width: 1024px) {
.hours-grid {
grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr;
}
}That’s it. No utility classes to memorize. No build process to configure. Just CSS doing what CSS has been able to do since 2012.
The Deployment Story
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Because we’re just serving static files, deployment becomes trivial:
- Netlify? Drag and drop the build folder
- Vercel? Connect your GitHub repo, done
- Cloudflare Pages? Same deal
- Shared hosting? FTP the files up
No server requirements to meet. No environment variables to configure. No build scripts that mysteriously fail in production.
When This Approach Wins (And When It Doesn’t)
This isn’t a silver bullet. If you’re building the next Airbnb, you probably need React. If you’re building a real-time dashboard, you definitely need JavaScript frameworks. If you’re building a bar website, you need to show people your menu and tell them when you’re open.
The Quiet Bar template wins when:
- Your content changes infrequently (hours, menu, photos)
- Performance matters more than interactivity
- You want something you can actually maintain yourself
- You’d rather spend money on good whiskey than web hosting
It doesn’t win when:
- You need daily content updates
- You want complex interactive features
- You have a team that expects modern development workflows
- You’re building the next big thing
The Philosophy
This isn’t really about bars. It’s about choosing the right tool for the job, even if that tool seems boring or outdated.
We spend so much time chasing the latest frameworks, the newest build tools, the hottest deployment platforms. We optimize for developer experience and forget that the end user just wants to see if you’re open on Tuesdays.
Sometimes the best code is no code. Sometimes the best framework is no framework. Sometimes the best way to build a website is to just… build a website.
The Quiet Bar template isn’t revolutionary. It’s deliberately evolutionary—taking the tools that have worked for decades and applying them to a problem that doesn’t need solving with complexity.
And really, isn’t that what a good neighborhood bar is all about? No pretense. No unnecessary complications. Just a comfortable place that does the basics really, really well.