A concept redesign for a South Pearl Street dive bar that’s open 365 days a year. The old site had the info but lost the room. The new one puts specials, food, and hours where thumbs can reach them, without sanding off the personality.
The Candlelight is a real neighborhood bar: daily specials, wings on Tuesdays, bar games, and Denver’s best Detroit Lions crowd. The website was a text dump that was hard to read on a phone, which is exactly where people look up a bar at 9pm.
A dive bar redesign has one trap: make it too polished and you kill what people love. The design had to feel like the room, dark and warm, not like a gastropub.
The page opens on a full bleed photo of the bar itself under a script Candlelight lockup, with a dark scrim keeping the type readable. Big Shoulders Display carries the headers with a tall, no nonsense presence that fits the room.
Specials, food menu, and hours sit at the top of the page in that order, matching what a regular actually checks. Every price and special from the current site carried over, restructured into scannable blocks instead of one long table.
The whole site is a single HTML file that can live on free static hosting, replacing paid WordPress maintenance. I also scoped a lightweight CMS option so staff could update specials themselves without touching code.
A live single page build that keeps every special, every price, and all the Lions bar bragging rights, in a form people can actually read on a phone. Faster to load, cheaper to run, and true to the bar.