Arun's Wedding Dates

Type in your wedding date and see which DJs and bands in town still have that day free to play.

Who this is for

Arun Deshmukh plays keyboard and runs a seven-piece wedding band in Amravati, and does DJ nights when the band is resting. He knows fourteen other band and DJ owners in town by first name. In November his phone rings from seven in the morning, and every second caller asks the same thing: is the twenty-second free. He is usually on a scooter when they ask.

How the job is done today

Arun keeps a long diary with a page per month and pencil marks for held dates, half of which are only verbal holds from a cousin of a client. When a caller wants a date he has already given away, he forwards the number to a WhatsApp group of band owners called Amravati Sound Party and waits for someone to reply. Sometimes four people reply and the customer is called by all four. Sometimes nobody replies for two days and the customer has already booked in Akola. The families, meanwhile, are ringing fifteen numbers off a wedding card printer's visiting card pile.

The screens, in order

1. Date box — One large box where a family types or picks the wedding date, and nothing else on the page to distract from it.
2. Who is free — Shows the bands and DJs open on that date as plain rows of name, what they play, and the town area they are based in.
3. One band's page — Gives a family enough to decide whether to ring this particular band, in about ten lines of text.
4. Call or message — Puts the band's number one tap away and lets the family send a short note with their date and venue if they are shy about calling.
5. Band's own page — Lets Arun or any other owner open their private link and mark off the dates they have been booked for.

What it keeps track of

• Bands and DJs — name, live band or DJ or both, which area of town, what they charge roughly, phone number, one line about them
• Booked dates — which band, which date, and nothing more
• Enquiries — family's name, phone number, wedding date, venue area, which band they wrote to, when it came in

The one decision that matters

The real choice is whether a band marks the days it is free or the days it is booked. Marking free days sounds tidier and gives cleaner answers, but it means Arun sitting down every month to tick three hundred boxes, and the day he forgets, he vanishes from the site during peak season. Marking booked days is the smaller job: he is already writing that date in his diary, so he adds it here too, maybe fifteen times a season. Go with booked days. Everyone is assumed free until someone says otherwise. The cost is the occasional family ringing a band who forgot to mark a date, which is exactly what happens now anyway.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out photos, song clips, ratings, and any kind of paid listing order. Photos are the first thing that fails on a five-year-old phone with one bar of signal, and a wedding band is chosen by a phone call and a cousin's recommendation, not by a gallery. Leave out logins as well. Each band gets a long private link on WhatsApp that opens straight into their date page, so nobody has to remember a password during shaadi season.

How you would know it worked

A family in Amravati rings Arun in November and says the site showed him free on the twenty-second, and he does not have to open his diary to know they are right.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I run a wedding band and DJ setup in Amravati and I want a simple website where a family types their wedding date and immediately sees which bands and DJs in town are free that day, shown as plain rows with name, whether they are live band or DJ, which area they are in, roughly what they charge, and a big call button and a small message box. Each band gets its own private link they can open on WhatsApp to tick off the dates they are already booked for, no password, and everything not ticked is treated as free. It must be black text on white, very large, no photos, and it should load fast on an old phone outside in the sun. Send me the enquiries as a simple list I can check every evening.