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Chaos,

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Right now my idea for lighting is to have the bar and dancefloor both pretty dark with neon tube lights on the bar.

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Start studying lighting, really study it. Go into every bar, club and restaurant in town and see which ones make you feel like staying. Then check out their lighting. You can do everything right, you can have the whole place perfect, but if you feck up the lighting you'll be history.

And do not use neon. We have neon lights in our bar. We use them as the "get the customers out of the bar at 3am lights". They work really well in this regard. There is no sarcasm intended here.

Lets talk DJ's. Your average punter doesn't know jack about music or DJing, but they all think they do, and they're vocal about it. I advise you not to base your music rostering system on public popularity from tenny-bobbers. Here is the key with DJ's; do not have a fixed DJ at a fixed time. Move them constantly around, keep them on their toes. As soon as one starts getting stale, swap him for another one. We are a small club, I can get maybe 200 people inside. I have a roster of six DJ's and I'm training three more to do my bidding.

My suggestion to you is to locate and hire a music and lights co-ordinator. They are responsible for the DJ roster, band bookings and out of town DJ bookings and managing the dance floor lighting system. What? Managing the dancefloor lighting system? What the hell is he on about?, I hear you say.

You didn't think you could just put some moving cool lights up and that was it did you? Apart from the fact that gels burn out and need constant replacing, you need to reprogramme your lights every week. Otherwise it becomes staid and predictable and boring. I can do this in my current bar, you won't be able to, you'll have too much on your plate. And lights are an evolving science. You won't hit on the right combination until about 6 months into your operation. The same goes with your sound system. Move one subwoofer two feet to the left and your entire phasing balance is out. Or Perfect. Who knows? A sound and light engineer, that's who. And that's who you need to worry about all this stuff.