Who made this

Design and build

Zac Websites

Design, build, copy, SEO and ongoing care by Zac Websites, working from Launceston. zacwebsites.com.au · zac@zacwebsites.com.au

Hand-written HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. No framework and no page builder: every page is written by hand and served exactly as written, and the only generated files on the site are the images. It loads fast because there is almost nothing in it that does not need to be.

The whole thing is thirteen HTML pages, one stylesheet, about six hundred lines of JavaScript and a single PHP file behind the forms, with 188 image files under them. No content management system, no build step and no templates, so what sits on the server is exactly what was written.

It is all written up in full, page by page and decision by decision, at zacwebsites.com.au/star-bar

The design

One building, two lives

The venue runs from 11am to late, so the site does too. Pages open in daylight on the colour of old plaster, pass through a dusk band, and finish in the racing green and black of the room after dark. The colours are not invented: they were sampled from the photographs below, then checked pair by pair for legibility.

The house mark in the corner is the venue's own. The small star that divides one chapter from the next is drawn in CSS rather than loaded as an image, so it takes its colour from whichever hour of the page it is standing in.

Scope

Design, build, copy and SEO

Built

2026, in Launceston, Tasmania

Typefaces

Newsreader and Plus Jakarta Sans, served by Google Fonts

Palette

Racing green, timber, black and paper, sampled from the venue photography

Built with

HTML5, CSS3 custom properties, vanilla ES5 JavaScript

Images

AVIF and WebP with a JPEG fallback, each one cut to the shape of the box that shows it

Contrast

Every text and background pairing on the site meets WCAG 2.1 AA

Structured data

Schema.org JSON-LD, plus llms.txt for AI assistants

Language

English, en-AU

Hosting

Apache, configured by .htaccess

Table bookings

Now Book It, embedded on the restaurant page

Borrowed code

iFrame Resizer v4.2.3 by David J. Bradshaw, MIT licence, so the booking form can size itself to its own content. The only library on the site.

Works without

JavaScript. Every page is complete before a script runs.

Photography

Sarah Brooks

Almost every photograph on this site was taken by Sarah Brooks Photography, in one evening at the venue on 23 June 2025. The bar, the dining room, the wood oven, the cocktails, the staff, the front window and the band on stage are all hers. Used with permission.

The rooftop bar counter on the neighbourhood page is by Dave Groves Photography.

The three rooftop photographs on The Bar, the guest room and the barbecue pizza were taken on a phone, by the venue.

Thanks

To the building

And to everyone who has had a night in it since 1828.

See humans.txt