101–110 of 124 posts
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Ugh. Just learn LaTeX and write once.
LaTeX isn't the only way you can "write once"; while there are LaTeX exporters for the formats mentioned, you can do the same with LibreOffice, which exports to Word, PDF, and HTML much easier than LaTeX docs do (LaTeX conversion usually requires three different tools, it's a simple Save As... or Export in LibreOffice).
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The other problem is going beyond, "hours of operation/location" + "menu" + "phone number" takes integration with on site software. So now your competing with all those Point Of Sale systems. IMO, there is a huge opportunity for a unified website + POS + Back end software company. But, to step beyond what's out there would take a huge investment.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I help run a family restaurant with tight margins to deal with. With really small capital to budget, my father and uncle decided a POS system was not worth the money and commissioned me to build a usable system since I was the "tech guy" of the family. I hacked something up using kiosk mode browser running off of locally-hosted PHP scripts saving to a MySQL database that backsup online…
I help run a local dance and have been looking for a simple, small POS setup to help tally people (students, adults, seniors, and association members) through the door. Right now we put tick marks in a log book.
I was thinking about developing a jQuery / PHP / PostgreSQL system with nightly updates to Google Docs. Something that would run on a 5-year old laptop.
We've found that the owners and managers who "don't get it" are the ones who think that the web site experience should be the same as the restaurant experience: background music, a menu that looks identical to the physical one, and a picture of every dish.
The ones who do "get it" entrust their web site to designers and usability experts who make it their goal to turn web site visitors into patrons.
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Oh my god, dentist's websites. I've one full year of dental school left, and as I'm looking around for a job, I sometimes wonder if I should just be a dental website designer instead of a dentist.
So ... why NOT be a dentist website designer, at least part-time? You know the business needs, you know the lingo of both (you're here, anyway) ... It sounds like a job that fills a needed niche! Better sites == more hits due to easier searching; there's a business case. I say go for it.
Huh. I just realized that I have a strange association between restaurants and their websites. My expectation of quality is inversely correlated to the quality of their website. When I see a restaurant website that is "good", it makes me thing "chain. corporate. bland. boring."
Am I the only person who doesn't mind chain and corporate eateries?
What I was getting at is that a crappy website can sometimes be a good indicator for places like the little deli that I go to sometimes, or my neighborhood bar. If the little deli (called cheese and stuff, for you Phoenicians: http://www.cheesenstuffdeli.com/) had a "good" website, it would seem out of character to me.
Restaurants aren't unique offenders. Most physically extant businesses which can't transact online suck. Try your dentist's.
No matter how unique a restaurant's website is, it cannot satisfy a customer to that restaurant: only the food can. Thus there is little impetus for the restaurant to try to create a good experience online.
You can't make money if you can't even get customers in the door!
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Ugh. Just learn LaTeX and write once.
LaTeX isn't the only way you can "write once"; while there are LaTeX exporters for the formats mentioned, you can do the same with LibreOffice, which exports to Word, PDF, and HTML much easier than LaTeX docs do (LaTeX conversion usually requires three different tools, it's a simple Save As... or Export in LibreOffice).
That's what shell scripts are for. It is trivial to write a script that will accept a LaTeX filename and run the necessary commands on it. It is only a little bit more work to add in hooks (e.g., to your IDE) such that the script is run automatically upon saving the file.
Moreover, with .tex files being plain-text, you could even write simple scripts to assist with updating the documents themselves. Something like "add-new-reference" or "update-hobbies" could accept input from the user and add it to the .tex file quite trivially.
This is in contrast to a GUI program, where you are basically forced to fire up a heavyweight editor, perform the changes by hand, and then perform each export one-by-one, also by hand. I know you could script old versions of OpenOffice using Java or Python, but that ends up being way more convoluted than doing the equivalent with a .tex file.
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The other problem is going beyond, "hours of operation/location" + "menu" + "phone number" takes integration with on site software. So now your competing with all those Point Of Sale systems. IMO, there is a huge opportunity for a unified website + POS + Back end software company. But, to step beyond what's out there would take a huge investment.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I help run a family restaurant with tight margins to deal with. With really small capital to budget, my father and uncle decided a POS system was not worth the money and commissioned me to build a usable system since I was the "tech guy" of the family. I hacked something up using kiosk mode browser running off of locally-hosted PHP scripts saving to a MySQL database that backsup online…
Interestingly, here in Israel, there's a standard layout for restaurant websites that is almost always used, and it's pretty good. I'm not 100% clear on the history, but afaik, a website called Rest.co.il (a restaurant directory), offers restaurants a service for creating a website for them. I'm guessing that initially, most restaurants that didn't have a website just created one through Rest. Nowadays, 80% of restau…
Eh, that's what Google Translate is for.
That looks like a perfectly good standard template, both visually and in hitting the points of what customers want to know - menus (with prices!), hours, links to directions, some sense of what the place looks like, etc.
"because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it"
Very cool. There's something to be said for a genuinely good basic approach.
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Look into the Factual API for restaurants to solve this problem.
it looks like most of your data came from crawling us (yellowpages.com)