Today we are very excited to launch a new feature: Stats.

Our stats package shows you how many people are visiting your site, who they are, where they’re coming from, and what pages they’re looking at. This lets you measure the effectiveness of your web site and see how SandwichBoard is helping to introduce customers to your restaurant.

Let’s take a look (you can click on any of the images for a larger version):

Across the top is a graph showing how many visits you had for each of the last 30 days. This gives a good measure of how many people are viewing your site each day. Immediately below the graph is a summary of how many visits, unique visitors and page views you’ve had in the last 30 days.

Next there are a few statistics telling you about your visitors. How many are new visitors, how many leave after one page, and how many use certain browsers and operating systems.

The little graph next to each statistic is called a sparkline and shows the daily totals for each of the statistics. Sparklines are a great way to get an idea of the daily variation and general trends of each of the statistics.

Next we have a series of tables showing where your visitors come from. The first table shows how many visitors found you via a search engine, how many followed a link from another site, and how many came directly to your site. Then there is a table that shows the sites that have linked to your site. To the right is a table showing what keywords people have searched for to find your site.

You can click on the title of any column in any table to sort the table.

Finally we have a table that shows what pages are being visited, how many times each has been viewed, and how long visitors stay on that page.

To view the stats just click on the stats tab at the top of your admin screen.

If you are designing your own theme please make sure to insert {{ restaurant.stats_tracker }} right before the </body> tag in layout.liquid

We’re really excited about this feature and think it is going to help show how valuable having a web site is. If you have any questions or comments please let us know at support@sandwichboard.com

One of our newer customers, The Middlebrook Restaurant and Pub, decided to use the Default SandwichBoard theme but wanted something that better resembled their restaurant's branding. They worked with a local web designer to change the site's color scheme and the layout of the location map. The simple changes were a great branding move and resulted in a beautiful site. Check it out.

(For the technical among us: after they selected the appropriate colors, they were configured in the site.css and page.css, which control the styling of a site's theme and pages respectively.)

I recently got hooked on Gordon Ramsay. He's a renowned chef and author in the UK who hosts two TV programs called Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares. In Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon visits struggling restaurants, picks them to pieces, and helps them turnaround for the better. You can catch episodes on the BBC, FOX, and DVD. Learning from other restaurants' mistakes and Gordon Ramsay's sound advice is certainly worth the time and money. Check it out yourself.

We’ve updated our sign-up process so that it doesn’t require you to enter a credit card. You can now use SandwichBoard for the full 30 day trial without entering your credit card information.

So if you wanted to try out SandwichBoard before, but didn’t want to enter your credit card information, go sign-up now. We think you’ll like what you see.

Google now provides a way for restaurant owners to know whenever content about their establishments is published online. It's called Google Alerts. By answering four quick questions on its home page, Google Alerts can notify you of any new content of your choosing.

The trick is creating Google search criteria that will gather the right information without giving you the wrong information. Try out your Google Alerts search query on Google first to make sure it will gather the right results. It might take a little tweaking, but will be worth the effort in keeping your inbox lighter.

Today is a very proud day for us, as after several months of private beta we have just publicly launched SandwichBoard.

What is SandwichBoard?

SandwichBoard is the best way to create and maintain a restaurant’s website. We’ve worked really hard to make managing a restaurant’s website with SandwichBoard as easy as writing an email, updating a Facebook profile, or writing a blog entry. We let restaurant owners and managers update their menus, events, locations, and news from a web browser without having to learn anything about HTML or web design.

The best way to describe SandwichBoard is to show it in action, so please go check out our introductory video.

Why Restaurants?

I started working in restaurants when I was still in high school and paid my way through college as a busboy, waiter, bartender, and manager. I love restaurants. And I saw how painful it is for most restaurants to manage their web sites.

Every restaurant needs a web site, but getting a good one is currently an expensive and time consuming proposition. First, you have to hire a graphic designer, then you have to find, set-up, and pay for web hosting. Most of the time this involves signing a multi-year contract. One restaurant I know just spent upwards of $20,000 on a site redesign.

And after all that you can’t easily update your site. Every time you change your menu or want to make a change to a page you have to call up the designer and pay them more to make the change. This leads to restaurant web sites being out of date. And the only thing worse than not having a web site is having customers show up to find out that you now close an hour earlier than your 2 year old web site says.

SandwichBoard solves this problem. When a restaurant signs up for SandwichBoard they can start building their site immediately. In minutes they can create a basic site, and in about an hour they can create about a complete site. We give them a choice of several pre-built themes. They can use the theme as is, customize the theme themselves, or higher a designer to build them a custom theme. Once the theme is set up they can easily manage their entire site without the need to involve (and pay) the designer.

We’re so confident that restaurants are going to love SandwichBoard that we let them try it free for a month. We also don’t lock them into a long term contract, so they can cancel at any time.

A cool new web site just launched called CookThink. It lets you find recipes by entering what sorts of ingredients you're craving. Once you've picked a few, CookThink gives you recipes that will satisfy those cravings and similar ones to try out later too.

If you're working on revising your menus or are just looking for something to eat yourself, give CookThink a whirl.

[Via TechCrunch]

It could not have happened at a worse time. A major snowstorm was howling outside. Whole Foods supermarket at Bishops Corner in West Hartford was jammed with shoppers anxious to get home for dinner.

Suddenly, the computer crashed. None of the cash registers could function. Ted Donoghue, the assistant manager running the store on the afternoon of Dec. 13, consulted associates and made a snap decision:

All customers passing through the registers would get their food for free until the computers were working again.

The complete article is here.

Now obviously this isn’t possible in every situation, but this does show an amazing institutional commitment to customer service. In total the decision cost the store about $4,000. A chain the size of Whole Foods can clearly absorb that cost, and I guarantee that each of those customers will not only be a customer for life, but will tell several friends about their good experience.

The best way to market yourself is by being remarkable.

One of the things we're working on here at SandwichBoard is the ability for you to see how much traffic your web site is getting and where that traffic comes from. This helps you determine if SandwichBoard is a good use of you money. (Actually, it's really so we can show you how good SandwichBoard is at bringing you business.)

One of our customers, Carminha Simmons of Aqui Brazilian Coffee, goes even farther. Whenever she spots someone new in her coffee shop, she simply asks them how they found out about Aqui. We launched her site on a Friday morning. The next day she had three new customers come and visit simply because they visited her web site. Armed with that knowledge and our stats, restaurant owners and managers cannot only see that SandwichBoard is a good investment, but can also figure out how customers got to their site in the first place, and build their marketing strategy in the direction of real leads.

SandwichBoard has just entered Intuit's Just Start competition. After viewing our entry, go ahead and submit your idea for that next restaurant of yours.

"...the apparent origin of wine affects the perception of a restaurant's food and even the probability that the customer will return."

Read the whole article: "Wine and the Spillover Effect"

I'm sure you've seen a movie or two where one of the characters doesn't know who they are. Either they were in an accident that left them in a state of amnesia or their memory was purposely erased. The fun comes in watching them figure out who they are and what they are supposed to do in life. This makes for a great story, but it is a bad way to run a business.

An unclear understanding and definition of who you are as a restaurant will quickly lead to disorder. The food you decide to carry on your menu, the takeout service you offer, your marketing campaign, how you resolve customer complaints, and how you answer the telephone, all hinge on who you are. Are you a fine dining or family style restaurant, pub, bistro, or coffee shop? Do you envision patrons eating with silverware or with their hands? Do you want them waiting two minutes or half an hour for their food? How much should they pay for your food? Should they come to be entertained or catered to?

Having a concise and articulate understanding of who you are will guide you in both consistency and decision-making. Because you know who you are and who you are not, you can look at a decision and ask whether choosing one path or another simply fits. When looking to buy a car, I knew that the Volkswagen Beetle, Mazda Miata, and the Hummer were just not me. There's nothing wrong with those vehicles and there are numerous people who love theirs; they just didn't fit in with my understanding of who I am. I was able to scour a large quantity of web and print listings quickly, knowing what to look at and what to simply pass over. Understanding who you are leads to quick decisions--yours and those of your staff.

Definition will also help you maintain consistency. If different staff members know who you are, they will know how to resolve customer issues without being partial, without being haste, and without making the wrong decisions in your absence. They will know how to answer your phone and how to welcome patrons at the door.

If you can't answer who you are in a sentence or two (or three), take the time to define who you are. Revisit your menu, your decor, your branding and marketing. Make the changes necessary to succinctly communicate who you are. Go beyond the mechanics and inform your staff too. Have them define who you are as a restaurant from time-to-time and keep reminding them until it has sunk in.

Quick and consistent decisions will help customers know what to expect when they visit. That stability will create trust with them, bringing them back again and again.

(This article was largely inspired by a bullet-point on a presentation by Mark Thomas at the Mid-Atlantic Food, Beverage, and Lodging Expo in Baltimore, Maryland, Summer of 2007.)