LetsEat! News

Add your restaurant's menu to Facebook in two easy steps

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:06:16 -0800

LetsEat! is proud to announce a huge new feature: Facebook Menu Integration. With this new integration feature, you can add your LetsEat! website menu to a menu page on your Facebook profile.

It only takes two steps:

1. Go to Settings » Facebook Menu, and enter the URL of your Facebook page (it should look something like http://www.facebook.com/yourbusiness or http://www.facebook.com/pages/yourbusiness/123456)

2. Go to our app on Facebook and click the “Add to My Page” link.

The LetsEat! Facebook app has all the same features as our standard website menus, including photos, Like buttons, PDF downloads, daily specials, a printer-friendly link and multiple menu pages as tabs.

This feature is only available to LetsEat! Pro members, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, now is the time! Check out a sample menu on our Facebook page (and don’t forget to Like us while you’re there!).

Google Maps update

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:40:00 -0800

The map system has been updated and you no longer need to use a special API key in order to use Google Maps with a custom domain name. Time to add a map to your site, if you haven’t done so already!

New site translation: French

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:45:28 -0800

In addition to Spanish and English, the LetsEat site navigation is now available in French! You can change the language of your website by going to Settings » General Information and altering the drop down for Site language.

Business Hours update

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:02:08 -0800

In preparation for some future features, there is now a dedicated system to managing your restaurant’s store hours in Settings » Business Hours. This is completely optional (your old business hours text field is now located in Settings » General Information under the title Additional Information). However, it simplifies things quite a bit, and will be required for certain upcoming features, so it’s highly recommended that you switch over.

It allows for multiple schedules, so if your bar operates under different hours, or if you have multiple shifts (Breakfast, Lunch, etc.), you can list them separately.

Mobile updates: Coupons, Google Maps, and Social Media

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:25:23 -0700

As of today, all LetsEat! Mobile sites have been upgraded to include some new features including display of coupons (previously only available in the full site) as well as touch-device enhanced Google Map integration and links to your social media pages.

You don’t need to do anything to receive these updates—they’re already live on your mobile site. If you haven’t added your social media links yet, you can do so by going to Settings » Social Media.

Setting up your restaurant with a custom Gmail account

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 22:31:00 -0700

Do you have email set up with your custom domain name?

Using Google Apps, you can set up a free Gmail account for up to 10 of your employees. This means that you can set up email addresses like joe@examplediner.com and sally@examplediner.com, then access them online through Gmail the same way you may already do with your personal account. All you need to get started is a custom domain!

It takes a bit of work (maybe 15-20 minutes), but it’s not so bad. For your convenience, all the steps necessary have been outlined with pictures in our help section.

Easy custom domain integration with Godaddy and Namecheap

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 22:19:00 -0700

Have you set up a domain for your restaurant’s website yet? It’s cheap and only takes a few minutes to get going!

Instructions for setting up custom domain names purchased from Godaddy and Namecheap are now available in the help section. This is in addition to setup instructions for domains from LetsEat’s domain store.

New home page design!

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:38:50 -0700

The home page has been updated. Hope you all like it! The restaurant console will start to receive some incremental updates as well. Keep checking here, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook for the latest updates.

Improved Search Engine Optimization for your Restaurant

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:08:00 -0700

Continuing the effort to keep your restaurant’s website at the top of Google and Bing’s search results listings, we’ve made some SEO improvements to the individual menu item and event pages.

Along with improved behind-the-scenes HTML markup, we’ve added better-performing, more aesthetically pleasing SEO web addresses for your menu item and event pages. The web address changes take effect for all menu items created after today, while the markup is available immediately.

Want a bullet-proof way to improve your restaurant’s search engine rankings for your home and menu pages? If you haven’t purchased a custom “.com” domain, you should do so ASAP! While our websites are automatically optimized to industry best practices for good positioning in the results, a “.com” domain will send you much higher up in the search results pages.

You can purchase a domain from our store (domains.letseat.at) or from any other domain registrar and integrate it with the instructions in our help section. Setup for domains purchased from our domain store only takes a few minutes.

Introducing LetsEat! Annual Billing

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:55:40 -0700

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

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:04:49 -0800

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

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:33:00 -0800

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

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:26:30 -0800

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

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:04:25 -0800

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

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:17:00 -0700

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.