Case study · Event microsite · 2026
An event microsite for the Auto Be Grillin' BBQ team's three-day hospitality push at the Memphis in May World Championship — schedule, hotels, RSVP, all the logistics on a phone.
Event micrositeThe problem
Memphis in May World Championship BBQ runs three days, hosts 250+ teams, and pulls hospitality guests in from out of town. UnitedR2 sponsors a team — Auto Be Grillin' — and hosts clients, partners, and partner companies in their tent across the event.
The hosts needed a single URL to send guests: when does it start, where's the hotel, what's the schedule, RSVP here. Email threads weren't going to handle it. A full event-tech stack was overkill for something that lives for three months and disappears.
And it had to be obvious on a phone in 90-degree May heat, half a beer in, with patchy festival cell signal.
The approach
We built it static. No CMS, no database, no ongoing fee. One HTML file, mobile-first CSS, theme art for the year's "Rub of the Irish" identity (green palette, leprechaun pig, lots of shamrocks).
RSVPs go to a Google Sheet the team already monitors — same pattern we used for Guess the Gavel. Apps Script on the sheet sends a confirmation email to the guest and notifies the hosts.
Hosted at bbqfest2026.unitedr2.com — a subdomain on UR2's parent domain so the team owns the URL and can leave the site up as a memento after the event without worrying about a separate registration to renew.
Three months of life. ~200 expected RSVPs. ~zero need for accounts or auth. Static HTML on a subdomain is the right tool — anything more would have been overhead the team didn't need.
bbqfest2026.unitedr2.com keeps the URL inside UR2's existing domain. No separate registrar, no extra renewal, no DNS to coordinate. The 2027 site will sit at bbqfest2027.unitedr2.com next year and the pattern is reusable.
The hospitality team lives in spreadsheets anyway. RSVPs flow into a sheet, Apps Script handles the confirmation email, the team works the list the way they already work everything else.
Most guests open the site on a phone, often outdoors. Big buttons, single-column scroll, generous spacing, ~zero JS dependency. Loads instantly on festival-grade signal.
The outcome
The microsite went live within a few days of brief. Schedule, hotels, FAQ, RSVP — all on a single mobile-friendly scroll. RSVPs landed in the team's Google Sheet within seconds of submission.
Zero ongoing cost. Sits on UR2's existing infrastructure. After the event it can stay up as a record or be torn down with a single subdomain delete.
Next year's edition (BBQ Fest 2027) will sit at the parallel URL with the same architecture — the pattern is reusable. Year-over-year iteration on hospitality logistics, year-over-year zero in maintenance overhead.
What we shipped
Related work
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