Poodie's Hilltop Roadhouse · Spicewood, TX (Austin area)
The live music calendar that fills itself every night
Poodie's Hilltop Roadhouse books live music seven nights a week. We replaced a hand-edited Dreamweaver site with one whose calendar updates itself from the venue's Google Calendar every night.
- Booking calendar events since 2014
- 5,400Booking calendar events since 2014
- Real shows loaded at launch
- 62Real shows loaded at launch
- Weekly residencies that schedule themselves
- 5Weekly residencies that schedule themselves
- Menu page network requests
- 32 → 4Menu page network requests
Integrations & automations
Google Calendar
A nightly sync turns new bookings on the venue's existing calendar into draft shows, skipping duplicates.
Outhouse Tickets
Ticket links and show artwork are pulled in automatically for every show.
Self-scheduling residencies
Five weekly shows fill the calendar on their own, with skip dates for holidays and special events.
The challenge
Poodie’s Hilltop Roadhouse is a Texas honky-tonk on Highway 71 in Spicewood, 30 minutes west of Austin. The motto is “No Bad Days.” There’s live music seven nights a week on indoor and outdoor stages, a deck with Hill Country sunset views, and a full bar and kitchen.
Seven nights of music means a lot of shows to keep current, and the old website made that hard. It was hand-coded with Dreamweaver-era table layouts. The calendar was a hand-edited HTML table plus a flat image, so every booking had to be typed in twice: once on the venue’s Google Calendar, and again on the website. The menu was two PNG images that search engines couldn’t read and phones couldn’t zoom. The merch store’s domain had expired.
The venue already had a system that worked. Its booking calendar in Google Calendar holds 5,400 events going back to 2014. The website just wasn’t listening to it.
So the brief was clear: stop asking the owners to do the same work twice. Keep Google Calendar as the single place where shows get booked, and make the website follow along.
What we built
A calendar that fills itself
Every night the new site checks the venue’s Google Calendar and imports any new bookings as drafts. It skips duplicates of the weekly shows, then attaches ticket links and show artwork from Outhouse Tickets automatically. Each sync run is logged, so the owners can see exactly what came in and when.
The result: staff keep booking bands the way they always have, and the live music calendar on the website catches up on its own overnight. No second copy to maintain, and no more typing the same show into two places.
Weekly residencies on autopilot
Five weekly residencies fill the calendar on their own. When a regular night is off for a holiday or a special event, the owners mark a skip date and the calendar adjusts.
A custom admin the owners actually use
Changes go live instantly, with no developer in the loop. From one place, the team can manage:
- Shows: time, cover price, ticket link, sold-out and featured flags, and artwork upload
- The menu: drag to reorder, with dish photos
- The poster wall
- A messages inbox for contact form submissions
- Settings, including the status of the nightly sync
A printable flyer, straight from the website
Poodie’s has always posted a printed monthly calendar. Now the website’s monthly calendar prints as a one-page landscape flyer that matches it, so the paper version and the online version are always the same.
A real menu, built for an older crowd
The menu is now real, searchable text instead of pictures of text. It loads fast on a phone in a parking lot, too: the menu page went from 32 network requests to 4.
We also did a readability pass across the whole site. We raised 269 font sizes, so the smallest text went from 9px to 11px.
The little things a venue needs
- The deck section shows tonight’s sunset time, so guests can plan when to grab a seat.
- The Big Cartel merch store and Mailchimp newsletter are linked again.
- The contact form has spam protection, and contact and merch emails route to the right staff member.
- Uploaded images are resized into modern formats automatically.
Built to be found
Search engines now understand Poodie’s as a music venue and bar. Every show is marked up as its own event with ticket offers, and the menu is readable by Google too. The site has a sitemap and a guide file for AI search tools, and the old gallery address redirects to the new poster wall so no links were lost.
The result
Poodie’s launched with 62 real shows on the calendar, and it keeps filling itself every night. The owners book bands in Google Calendar like they always have. The website does the rest: drafts the show, adds the tickets and artwork, and keeps the weekly residencies running.
Here’s what the owners no longer have to do:
- Retype every booking into a hand-built HTML table
- Re-export a calendar image each time a show changes
- Hunt down ticket links and artwork for each show
- Remember to add the same weekly nights over and over
Book it once, in the calendar you already use, and the website catches up overnight. That’s hours of retyping that nobody has to do anymore, and a calendar fans can trust.
Run a venue? Let’s talk.
If you run a music venue, bar, or event space in Austin, the Hill Country, Kansas City or anywhere else, and your website is always a step behind your bookings, we can help. We connect the tools you already use, like Google Calendar and your ticketing platform, so your site updates itself. Tell us how you book shows today and we’ll show you what can run on its own.
