UK Catering Forum

Hi,
I'm Piers and I run a small web development company in London. We are developing a new service for restaurants and cafes to create and promote their menus online.

I've built a few websites for restaurants in the past and have family in the catering business. Through my experience, I have found that maintaining an up-to-date menu online is much more time-consuming, problematic and costly than it should be. And from a customer perspective, finding current menus online is certainly not a good as it could be.

I'm developing EveryDish as a service to combat these problems, and to push for an easier and more open way of storing and promoting menus using the internet. However, I want to involve the people who'll be using this service from early on, gauge your ideas and ensure that the service is built around you. This will also involve working closely with a few restaurants whilst the site is in private beta.

I have joined the UK Catering Forum to meet people who would use the service (and those that wouldn't), understand your problems as a caterer and gain feedback on some ideas. I will also, no doubt, contribute to any discussions about websites and social media in general.

I look forward to the discussions! feel free to contact me at piers@everydish.com.

Piers Rollinson
EveryDish.com

Hi Piers and welcome to the forum, sounds like a very interesting concept, looking forward to see how you get on and the feedback you receive.

Mac

Welcome to the catering forum Piers.

Hello and welcome. Sorry I have not been on for a while and just catching up.

Hi Piers

It sounds like a good idea and something that has the potential to bring in business.

The 2 things I would considr if I had a restaurant are costs and duplicate content. With the current changes in algorithms I would like to know what the future situation will be for duplicate content. Up to now in more chunks it does not seem to do any damage but there has been talk of penalising for it. Just a thought which you have probably considered.

Hi and welcome.
I am interested in the concept.

Hello and welcome to the UKCF Piers.

Yes I agree it sounds an interesting idea and anything that can help advertise a business has to begood these days. I would like to know more about exactly how you intend to do and also regarding the questions raised by Brian.

Brian/Stu,
We're looking at pricing the service on a subscription basis around £10-15/month (no contract, no hidden fees, etc).

Google
You raise a good point about duplicate content affecting search ranking and it's something which we have considered. However, using Everydish for your menus would not negatively affect search engine rankings.

How it would work
In a nutshell: Menus are stored on Everydish. From our site, they can then be distributed to restaurant's websites, Facebook Page, listing sites, etc. We take care of the technicalities of displaying menus over several sites and provide different versions for web, print and mobile.

When making changes to the menus or dishes restaurants use our online menu editor. Menus are then updated automatically wherever they are displayed. So, updating a menu can be done in a few clicks.

I would say that the main goals are:
[*] remove the time-consuming/technical aspects involved in updating the menu online -> encouraging restaurants to keep their online menus up-to-date for their customers
[*] provide a way for restaurateurs to (easily) distribute menus to many places: restaurant's website, social media pages, listing sites
[*] provide customers with better more up-to-date menus (ie, mobile-optimised/printer-friendly)

All of the functionality discussed above is already built and we are testing it with a few restaurants (If you'd like an invite I can send one privately). We're really trying to solve many problems that restaurateurs have. What do you think is most important?

Any thoughts on the service generally?

Piers

This is probably a bit aside from the service that you are offering but, I have worked as a 'holding manager' for the last few years and the big problem I have found with taking over a new pub is the amount of 'stuff' that is left on the web from (often multiple) previous incumbents. I am usually only there for a short time, so this is merely an annoyance but, if I was looking at any of these places long term I would like to have these sites either deleted or updated and would consider paying a fee to, at least, rectify the situation and start from scratch.

Having said that, I do like your concept and think you are approaching it well as far as this forum is concerned. You should get useful feedback, if nothing else, from here

Welcome to the forum and hope you enjoy using it.