Let the page take dates down itself
Every link on the page can carry a start and an end time. That turns the whole problem into something you do once, when you add the date.
Set it to appear on announcement day and to disappear the morning after the show. You will forget; the page will not.
This matters most during a run of dates, which is exactly when you have the least attention to spare for admin.
Put the useful information in the label
A visitor scanning a list of dates wants three things at a glance: when, where and whether they can still get in.
So the label should carry them. 14 March, Bristol, Thekla. Not Tickets, not Buy now, and certainly not Click here.
Sold out dates should stay on the page with the word on them. They are proof, and they tell somebody in that city to move faster next time.
Two audiences, two sections
Fans want tickets. Promoters want availability and evidence that you can fill a room.
- A dates section, in chronological order, with ticket links.
- A booking section with a contact route, a rider and a technical specification.
- Past dates, if you have them, as a short list rather than a full archive.
Keeping those separate stops the page reading like a poster to one group and like a brochure to the other.
One short link per date
Ticket links are ugly, long and change when a promoter moves platform. Both problems are solved by shortening them on your own domain.
Give each date a readable ending, such as /bristol-march. It survives being typed from a poster, put in a story, or read out from a stage.
And because the destination is editable, moving from one ticketing platform to another is one edit rather than a hunt through every post you have made.
The same link on print
A poster with a long ticketing URL on it is a poster nobody types. A QR code and a short address side by side is one that works both ways.
Because the code is dynamic, the same artwork can point at tickets before the show and at photographs or a recording afterwards.
Give each poster run its own link and you find out whether flyering the venue district did anything, which is the sort of question that otherwise gets settled by argument.
After the run
When the dates are done the page should not go blank. An empty section reads as inactive.
- Replace the dates section with a single link to a mailing list for the next announcement.
- Keep the last two or three past dates visible as evidence.
- Point the retired ticket links at the mailing list rather than leaving them dead.
- Check the statistics once, to see which city clicked most. That is where to play next.