Company News

Integrate Email Marketing into Your Restaurant's Website

January 16, 2010

LetsEat now has support for Constant Contact's powerful email marketing software. This new feature allows you to easily insert a newsletter signup widget into your restaurant website and automatically match the style of your website's theme.

The use of monthly newsletters to reach your customers is essential to a successful marketing program. With an email newsletter, you can easily inform regulars about upcoming specials, closures, and other events without them having to visit your website. Email is a fast, cost effective way to connect!

Find more information about this feature and how to sign up by logging in and going to My Restaurant » Constant Contact.

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10 New Restaurant Website Themes

December 14, 2009

There are 10 new themes posted in the theme gallery. They each have an alternate version without clip art graphics, bringing the current theme gallery total to 66 (about 25-30 completely original designs with alternate versions). These new themes include a few general restaurant designs, as well as an Indian restaurant template, a Southwestern/Mexican restaurant template, Japanese restaurant template, Italian restaurant template, burger restaurant template, and a few others. There are about a half dozen more that weren't published due to time constraints, so expect to see some more appear in the coming weeks.

These new themes all have a somewhat white header background-- hopefully that will make it easier to substitute your restaurant's logo for the default text header, as many of the previous themes had headers that didn't work very well with custom logo images. By using transparent dropshadows, the new themes also blend much better with custom background images, making them quite a bit more flexible than the previous restaurant website themes.

After a few years of feature development, the LetsEat's basic features are about settled, and there will be a new focus on improving the quality and quantity of themes, so expect to see some cool new themes popping up.

Are there any restaurant genres missing that you'd like to see? Send in a message with your ideas.

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Use LetsEat to Power Your Restaurant's Online Menu... For Free!

November 23, 2009

Using LetsEat's new external menu feature, you can add LetsEat to your existing website outside of LetsEat.at for free! It's easy: just sign up for a LetsEat account, create an online menu for your restaurant, then just copy and paste the script at the bottom of My Restaurant into your site's HTML.

You can edit the appearance and size of the popup or in-page iFrame by clicking on "Edit appearance and get code". From there, you can change the colors and sizes of the fonts and background of your menu to match your current website's look. With LetsEat powering your menu, you won't have to wait for your web designer to update menu items or specials, and customers won't see a stale menu from months (or years!) ago. Try it today!

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Add Social Media Links to Your Restaurant's Website

November 16, 2009

Building a strong social media presence is a great (and free!) way to form closer bonds with your regulars and to spread awareness of your restaurant. Promote your restaurant by linking to your Twitter, Myspace and Facebook pages with your LetsEat restaurant website. Connecting your site is a great way to gain new followers on Twitter, fans on Facebook, and friends on Myspace. It's simple: just login and go to www.letseat.at/my_restaurant/info/social_links. Enter links to your pages there, and an icon linking to each will appear in the sidebar of your website.

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Need Help Getting Started with Your Website?

November 15, 2009

With LetsEat's new setup wizard, creating a restaurant website has never been easier. Simply click on the "Start Wizard" link at www.letseat.at/my_restaurant and answer a few questions. It shouldn't take more 10 minutes to get from start to finish. Using LetsEat's wizard, you can quickly fill in your restaurant's street address info, populate your homepage, choose a restaurant website theme, and other basics. More setup wizards are being developed for creating online menus and setting up fonts.

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Public website navigation now available in Spanish

September 26, 2009

Restaurants can now have their website navigation displayed in Spanish by selecting 'Español' in My Restaurant » General Information » Language.

Almost all the elements of the public-facing side of your site will be translated when you select this option (meta information, footer, etc.). More language translations may follow in the future.

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Recent Updates to LetsEat.at

July 2, 2009

There have been quite a few additions to LetsEat.at since the last entry to the news section. I'll try to cover as many as possible here-- hopefully I don't miss anything.

Basic Mode

LetsEat.at now has a 'Basic Mode', which in a nutshell, offers a smaller, more focused site for you if you don't want all the bells and whistles. With 'Basic Mode', your menu is the homepage, and there are no other pages to the site. This makes it easy for you to use your site purely as a online menu, with no need for pictures, text, or whatever else.

You can also use your menu as the home page while in 'Advanced Mode' by going to 'My Restaurant » Home Page' and checking the 'Menu as Home Page' box.

Background Images

You now have the option of tiling a background image on your site. This works best with the default design (#1180), but works with quite a few others as well. Unfortunately, some of the themes just don't look very good with a tiled background image, but it's totally up to you to decide. You can add a background image by going to 'My Restaurant » Background Image'.

Stats

There are now two options for adding a stats counter to your LetsEat.at site. The first is to add a Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) counter by going to their site, signing up, and entering your Web Property ID at 'My Restaurant » Stats'. You can find your Web Property ID in your analytics code by looking for something that looks like this: UA-12345678-9.

For LetsEat.at Pro members, there is also a field in 'My Restaurant » Custom HTML' that says 'Scripts'. You can copy and paste any website counter codes you have there, and they will be inserted into the footer of each page.

Public Email Address

One other quick thing to mention is that you can now list an email address under your phone number by using the new 'Public Email' option in 'My Restaurant'. This email address is encrypted with JavaScript to minimize potential spamming, but just to warn you, encrypting it isn't going to stop 100% of the spambots out there. Your best bet is to use the default contact form, but oftentimes customers prefer just emailing you directly, so the choice is yours.

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How to Use a ".com" Domain from MyDomain.com

May 1, 2009

LetsEat.at gives your restaurant's customers a unique and memorable web address, but there's no doubt that some owners would prefer to use a ".com"-style (or ".co.uk", etc.) domain with their website.

For your convenience, there are now detailed instructions for setting up a domain purchased through MyDomain.com in the Help section. There will also be a similar set of directions for Godaddy and a few other major registrars in the near future.

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Keep Your Customers Up-to-date with LetsEat.at's Event Manager

April 24, 2009

As requested by many users, LetsEat.at now has an event management page. With the new Events page, you can add your restaurant or bar's upcoming holiday closures, live shows, and other time related events to you website. These events will appear either on your home page, in the sidebar, or on a separate page, depending on how you have them set in Events » Events Preferences.

As well as deciding where to put the event info, you can also determine how many to show at a time, and, if you're putting them on a separate page, what to title them ("Upcoming Events", "Live Music", "Show Calendar", etc.). The events will automatically be removed upon completion and will appear when they are within the next month (so you can go ahead and list that you're closed on Thanksgiving without it appearing on your website until November).

It's still somewhat barebones, but will be filled out with more features in the weeks to come. As always, feel free to send any feature requests regarding the events calendar and anything else around the site.

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Integrate Custom Web Designs into Your Restaurant’s Website

April 16, 2009

LetsEat.at Pro users can now integrate custom HTML headers and footers into their website using the custom HTML tab located in the My Restaurant page. With this feature, you can now have a web designer integrate a custom website design into the LetsEat.at website builder to use with your restaurant’s existing website.

With the simple interface, a web designer with HTML and CSS skills can integrate website code without need of any programming skills. The site can continue to be dynamically updated through the restaurant console by using the provided code snippets for content such as your hours, logo, address, etc., and you can also work off of any existing theme by overriding parts you don’t like through the custom CSS field.

For more information, please check out the help section.

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