I'm not entirely happy with the presentation on dnalounge.com, however, the web sites for every other nightclub in the world are even worse. Have you seen any that work well?
The site could use some design/usability help, but I'm not finding much inspiration out there.
One of the problems with our calendar pages is that the canonical URL for events has an anchor in it, like https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2010/05.html#28 -- this has become a problem because lots of recent web tools don't understand anchors, for example, posting this URL to Facebook grabs the text of the first event of the month instead of the event you're looking at; and similarly, tinyurl strips off the anchor.
Lots of sites that do calendars have their calendar page show just the cal-grid of event names (like we have at the top of the calendar page) and force you to drill down on a day to see more info (e.g., Slim's.)
But the reason I don't like that is that it makes it less likely that people will ever read the event descriptions. I suspect that by putting the event descriptions and embedded video clips right there, we are pulling in the occasional customer who might not have known that a given event was of interest to them. If you are just looking at a calendar grid that contains only the name of the headliner, you won't bother clicking on it unless you recognise their name. But if you are scanning down a page full of descriptions, maybe something about that unfamiliar event will catch your eye.
I would like to do more to encourage people to invite their friends to events, with the "I'm going" link so many social-networking sites have; that's why we spend so much time creating events on Facebook and other sites, and why the "Add this event to your calendar" box is there on the event listings. But, the look of that is kind of awful. I'm not sure whether the text-only version I have is less bad than the traditional NASCAR-badge-like mess of web-site logos that everyone else uses. Mine takes up more space, but I think it's more clear what's going on.
We also have this second tree for each event, the flyers archive, (which is linked to by the calendar as well as the top-level menu). I'm tempted to just combine the two somehow, but I'm not sure about that. Maybe it would be too cluttered and it should stay as-is, just an image gallery rather than an event-info page.
I also don't like it that our calendar pages are so wide. But there's a lot of info there, and the alternative is making the page require even more vertical scrolling... I'm not sure what a better layout for that would be, short of moving it off the calendar entirely and putting it all on dedicated sub-pages.
Our "Tickets" page is also kind of a travesty. It made more sense back when we only sold tickets for large live shows, but these days we tend to sell advance tickets for every event, so it has ended up basically duplicating our entire calendar.
Currently the front page of the site contains 3 photos from upcoming events, and 3 photos from random events, in an attempt at giving a sense of what goes on here. Maybe that space could be better used some other way. Maybe it should just be a calendar grid. Maybe emphasizing the Youtube clips would be more eye-catching (though mostly those are music videos of upcoming bands, not video that was recorded at DNA.)
