Ghouls in the Basement

Ghouls play to packed rooms across Austin every few weeks. Fans hear them once, leave the venue, and have nowhere to follow up — the Bandcamp page has the music but no tour dates, no bios, no personality. The default solutions (Wix, Squarespace, Linktree) all produce the same clean, gridded template that says nothing about a garage rock band.

The brief from the band was equal parts functional and aesthetic: it had to act as a hub for shows, music, and contact — but it had to feel like them. And it had to stay current without me being the bottleneck every time they had a new show or a new piece of news.

Modern band sites converge on the same template. To find a visual direction that matched the music, I ignored them and pulled from somewhere else: Cameron's World (the geocities collage), Heaven's Gate, vintage GameFAQs front pages, SNES title screens. The aesthetic shared a property the band wanted: it reads as a place someone made, not a CMS theme.

The constraints from the band came down to three:

Multi-page IA would be overkill — and would lose the "long Geocities scroll" feeling. Everything lives on a single page with anchor links in a chunky nav, so fans can either scroll the whole thing like a zine or jump directly to a section.

Before committing to a visual direction, I sketched the page in low-fi. The questions here were structural, not aesthetic — what runs on top, what stacks where, which sections need to feel like content vs landmarks. The wireframes are deliberately ugly. They have to prove the layout, not the look.

I built three full versions in straight HTML/CSS — no Figma slides, no prototyping tool. The fastest way to test "does this feel right?" was to throw a working page in front of the band and watch them react.

v1 was a restrained dark site that hit the visual goals at maybe 30%. v2 went full vintage paper / Heaven's Gate — cream background, blood red type, Pirata One drop shadows, banner row, hit counter. The band liked the top half. v3 pivoted into 8-bit / SNES territory — pixel band name, marquees, NES color palette. The band liked the bottom half. Final design is v3's bottom with a simplified, more colorful version of v2's top sensibility — taking the bits each iteration earned.

The hardest design constraint was "they need to update it without me." The honest answer for a band site is: not a CMS, not a static-site generator, just a tool they already use. They have Google Sheets.

One sheet, three tabs. The News tab feeds the news flash strip — each row becomes a headline item, the first gets a blinking NEW!! badge. The Media tab feeds the gallery (Type / Title / File per row, rendered as a clickable photo tile or an inline video player). The Show dates tab feeds the tour table (Date / Venue / Link / Label).

The page fetches all three tabs as CSV on load and rerenders those sections. If a fetch fails (offline, sheet deleted, whatever) the hardcoded fallback content stays. The band edits the sheet, refreshes the page, the site is up to date — no deploy step, no me involved.

The guestbook is a fourth piece — a Netlify Form at the bottom of the page that routes new submissions straight to the band's shared email. Same principle: the band moderates from a tool they already check.

The visual logic is the opposite of a modern brand system: panels in clashing primaries (hot pink, lime, cobalt, yellow, teal), pixel fonts next to blackletter, deliberate scanlines over the masthead. Every interactive thing throbs, blinks, or scrolls. The rule for what stays and what gets cut: does it earn a smile in the first three seconds? If yes, keep it.

One scrollable page. Pixel masthead and dual marquees at the top, four social pills (Bandcamp / Spotify / YouTube / Instagram), pixel-button nav, then the editorial content: news flash, brief history, tour table, hero photo, the four ghouls, photos & tapes, guestbook, footer.

Live preview — fully functional, including the lightbox and clickable member photos:

The final site reads as a band, not a template. It's live, with a guestbook form routing new submissions to the band's shared inbox. The band updates news, gallery, and tour dates through a shared Google Sheet — no commits, no me. The bandmate photos are clickable, videos play inline (re-encoded from .mov to .mp4 so they actually work in Chrome and Firefox on Windows), and the lightbox handles both via event delegation so it works on dynamically-added items too.