LetsEat! News

Introducing LetsEat! Annual Billing

As requested by countless users over the past few years, LetsEat! Pro is now available with annual billing. This convenient new billing cycle will not only simplify bookkeeping, but will save your restaurant some cash. If you haven’t upgraded yet, now is a great time to do so!

This also marks the beginning of a period of rapid feature releases. Check this blog regularly or follow us (@letseat) on Twitter for the latest developments around LetsEat!. We’ve got quite a lot of cool stuff waiting in the pipeline.

Reorganized Navigation System

In order to make room for some upcoming features, the navigation bar in the console area of LetsEat has been reorganized into 5 tabs with sub-navigation bars: Settings, Appearance, Pages, Add-ons, and Help.

It’s fairly self-explanatory, but in a nutshell:

Settings contains everything concerning the basic information about your restaurant, as well as your user account details. In this section you can set things such as your street address, time zone, language, and custom domain.

Appearance contains links to change your theme, edit HTML (if you have a Pro account), set font sizes, and upload a background image. Anything related to your restaurant’s web design will be located here.

Pages is the tab to go to in order to upload menus, coupons, events, or add any other content, including custom pages.

Add-ons currently consists of only 3 links—OpenTable, Constant Contact, and Google Analytics. In the coming months, expect to see more third-party widgets appear here.

Unfortunately, the Help section is a bit out-dated now, but will see a major overhaul in the next week or so. Apologies for any confusion during this phase of development, things will be changing quite rapidly for the next few weeks.

Improved Mobile Restaurant Website

As requested by countless users, the old Blackberry-ish mobile site has been completely replaced by a sleek, new iPhone/Android-friendly design. While compatible with basically any smart phone, the new design really flies on iPhones with some pretty cool slide effects, etc.

You can take a look at a sample site by navigating to http://m.letseat.at/YourRestaurant on any Webkit-based mobile phone (or Safari browser). There is still some work to be done on this (yes, the Events section will be added pretty soon), but it just made sense to publish it along with the other recent updates. Hope you like it!

Some New Features in the Menu Section

The menu section of LetsEat has been overhauled in the recent weeks, and is now quite a bit different than before, especially for LetsEat Pro members.

Menu Groups

Prior to the update yesterday, menus were restricted to one long page. In other words, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Drinks all had to share the same page. With the addition of Menu Groups, that has all changed.

Menu Groups are a category above the Menus that allows your restaurant to create individual pages for each category within your overall menu. For instance, a Menu Group called Lunch might have menu sections within it titled Sandwiches, Salads, Soups, etc.

Every restaurant now has all previous menus assigned to a default Menu Group, and LetsEat Pro users can now add as many Menu Groups as necessary. For your convenience, you can reassign your old menus to new Menu Groups by toggling the dropdown in the Menus » Edit page.

Scheduling

LetsEat Pro users now have the option to assign a start and end date to dishes. This could be useful for holiday meals, or other seasonal menu items.

Photos and Facebook

LetsEat Pro users can now attach photos to every menu item. Just as with the recent Events page update, menu items now have a Facebook Like button option, as well as their own page (you can get to it by clicking on their title when you’re looking at your website). Unfortunately, due to the current limitations of the Facebook API, the Facebook Like button option is not available for restaurants that don’t use their own domain name.

There are still a few unpublished features being added to this section of the site, so keep an eye out for some more additions very soon.

Events Calendar Updates

As many of you may have noticed, the Events area of LetsEat.at has received numerous updates in the recent weeks, and will continue to see some changes in the coming months.

Every event now has its own page (you can reach this page by clicking its title when you’re looking at your restaurant’s website), so you now have an individual URL to email to customers or post to social media sites. Restaurants that use a custom domain can also automatically add a Facebook Like button to the page that should post the event’s image, title and text to your Facebook wall.

LetsEat Pro members have a few new features in the Events section as well:

As requested by several users, there is now a recurring events option. This means that if your restaurant has live music or DJs every week, you can set up events to appear weekly just by checking a box when you create the Event listing.

Finally, LetsEat Pro members can now add a photo to every event. If your restaurant uses a custom domain, this photo will also appear as the thumbnail in Facebook when someone “Likes” your event.

Keep checking back for more updates to this section.

Uploading PDFs, images and other static files

As requested by several users, LetsEat Pro users can now upload static files to LetsEat for use with their themes and menus by doing the following:

• Log in
• Go to My Restaurant » Upload Assets
• Upload files
• Use the URL listed in your custom theme CSS or as PDF links in menus

Unlike images uploaded for use on your home page or via the gallery, these images will not be resized to fit your site. Possible uses include downloadable PDFs for your menu or for things such as custom logos or background images in your site.

It should be stressed that these uploads are only for use in conjunction with your LetsEat.at website; please don’t attempt to use LetsEat as a personal file hosting service, image transfer site, etc., as you will get your account suspended by doing so.