What your website can do

Everything on this page is live in the portal today, not on a roadmap. You change it from your phone, and the site shows it about a minute later. Grouped by the kind of business, because a food truck and a bar don't need the same things.

Food trucks and stands

Your spot changes, the weather changes, and something sells out by two. All of it from your phone, standing at the truck.

  • Set a different spot for every day of the week, each with a map link, so nobody drives to yesterday's lot.
  • Mark today closed with one tap and an optional reason โ€” rain day, sold out early โ€” and the site is back to your normal hours tomorrow by itself.
  • Mark a dish sold out for today and it's back tomorrow on its own; or switch it off for longer if you've stopped making it for a while.
  • Put a one-line announcement at the top of the site until a date you pick: "Cash only today", "Find us at the night market Oct 3".
  • Add events and pop-ups with a date, time and place. One that happens every week, every two weeks or monthly on the same weekday is entered once; you can pause it for a holiday week, and it skips any day you've marked closed.
  • Say "instead of our usual hours" on a festival day, and the hours table shows that day closed with the event named next to it.
  • Link to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, DoorDash or an order-ahead page, as buttons people actually see.
  • Take catering requests through the site: the contact form asks for the date, the headcount and a budget, and every request lands in the portal for you and your crew โ€” marked answered when it is โ€” as well as in your email.

See it on the food-truck demo site โ€” a different spot each day, a sold-out dish, a pop-up on the calendar, a catering option on the contact form.

Restaurants

A menu that stays right, hours that stay right, and the buttons your regulars are looking for โ€” without a call to anyone.

  • Put a Reserve button (OpenTable, Resy) and Order buttons (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Toast, Square) on the site, pointing at the accounts you already have.
  • Set holiday hours and multi-day closures weeks ahead. They take over on the day and drop off by themselves afterwards.
  • Build the menu in categories with photos, and put one dish in two places at once โ€” "Bestsellers" and "Mains" โ€” without entering it twice.
  • Give a dish sizes and options โ€” "Regular $15 / Large $19" โ€” and the menu shows it as "from $15".
  • Tag a dish vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free, spicy, local favorite or new, and the tags are translated on every language page.
  • Give a menu its own hours โ€” breakfast until 11, dinner from 5 โ€” and it's only shown during that window.
  • Publish Spanish and Japanese pages with the menu itself translated, not just the headings.
  • Print the menu from the same data, and let Google read your hours and dishes straight off the page in the structured format it asks for.
  • Take private-dining and event requests with a date, a headcount and a budget, and see them in the portal with an answered / closed status โ€” not only in whoever's inbox got the email.
  • Put a few words from real guests on the site, with a name, edited in the portal like everything else. The section exists only once you have a quote to show.
  • A second location? Each branch gets its own hours and phone number on the site, its own holiday closures, and its own "closed today" โ€” and Google reads every address as its own listing.

See it on the restaurant demo site โ€” two dining rooms with their own hours, including its Spanish and Japanese pages.

Bars and lounges

Everything under Restaurants applies here too. What a bar needs on top of that is mostly about time of day and day of the week.

  • Make happy hour its own menu section that's only shown from 3 to 6, so the prices on the site are the prices at the bar.
  • Enter live music every Friday once, as a repeating event, and it's on the site every week without you touching it.
  • Give Taco Tuesday and other day-specific specials the day they belong to, and they only show that day.
  • Put tonight's game in the announcement bar at the top of the site, and let it disappear on its own afterwards.
  • Hours past midnight are just hours โ€” 6 pm to 1 am reads as one night, on the page and in what Google reads off it.

Market stands and bakeries

Different markets on different days, a batch that's gone by ten, and things that only exist in mango season.

  • Say which market you're at on which day, with a map link for each, and the site shows today's.
  • Make an item weekday-only โ€” the Saturday loaf, the Thursday pie โ€” and it's shown only on those days.
  • Keep seasonal items in their own category โ€” "Mango season" โ€” and hide the whole category when the fruit's gone. Nothing is deleted; show it again next year.
  • Mark something sold out per batch โ€” sold out for today, back tomorrow by itself.
  • Link to a Square pre-order page so people can reserve a box before you sell out.

Everyone

The parts that aren't about food at all, and matter just as much.

  • Give each of your staff their own login, free. Every change is recorded with the name of the person who made it, and you can turn a login off the day someone leaves.
  • Look back at a history of every change โ€” what it was before, who changed it, when.
  • Send me a support message from inside the portal, with a screenshot pasted straight in, and get the reply in the same place.
  • Print a QR code for your table tent or truck window that opens your live menu, and switch the site's "Print menu" button on or off yourself.
  • Every message from the site's contact form reaches your email as before and lands in the portal too, so everyone with a login sees what came in and what has been answered.
  • See your invoices in the same portal, pay by card there, or save a card so the monthly takes care of itself.
  • Use all of it on a phone. The portal was built for a phone first, because that's what you have behind the counter.
  • Own the site outright once the setup is paid and the first year is up โ€” the files, the domain, all of it โ€” and take it anywhere.

Features you don't use are switched off and never show up โ€” not in the portal, not on the site. You switch the free ones on and off yourself, on one Features page in the portal: locations, branches, events, menu times, dietary tags, sizes, weekday specials, menu photos, testimonials, inquiries, printed menus, social posts, the print button. A restaurant with one address never sees a "today's spot" field, and a food truck without a Japanese menu never sees a translation box.

Printed menus and social posts

Your menu already lives in the portal. These two use it again, so nothing is kept in two places.

  • Print your own menu from the same dishes your website shows โ€” pick the categories (a drinks-only card, say), a title, one to three columns, Letter or A4, and one of four designs. Choose what goes on it: prices, descriptions, photos, sizes, dietary labels, your logo, your address, your hours, a QR code to the live menu. Change a price once and the website and the next printout are both right.
  • Print two languages on one sheet, if you publish in more than one.
  • Save the layouts you use โ€” “Lunch board”, “Catering flyer” โ€” and print the same thing next week in two clicks.
  • Make a post for Instagram or Facebook from a dish, an event, a closed day or today’s hours: the portal draws the picture in your colours and writes the caption, and your phone hands both to the app. You press Post โ€” nothing is published without you.
  • Your colours and fonts are taken from your own website, so what you print and what you post look like your site rather than like a form.

What it deliberately does not do

Some things are better done by companies that do only that. Your site links to them, prominently, and I don't rebuild them badly.

  • Online ordering and payment for food โ€” that stays with Square, Toast, DoorDash or whoever you already use; your site gets the button.
  • A reservations engine โ€” OpenTable, Resy or your own system; your site gets the button.
  • Loyalty programs, gift cards and deposits โ€” same answer.

The reason is honest rather than technical: those systems hold your customers' money and card details, and they have people on it around the clock. A website from a one-person company shouldn't. What your site does is the part they're bad at โ€” being found, being right today, and being yours.