"Custom pages" in the Pocket Diner Dashboard navigation

Under “Custom pages” you can add your own content pages, or links to pages not maintained in Pocket Diner.

All items added show up as a separate button on the start page of your Pocket Diner mobile website.

There is no limit to the amount of pages / links you can add, but  a word of caution: make sure to keep your mobile website simple, and focused on the facts your mobile web visitors are in need of. If you are drowning them with irrelevant content you might see less business coming your way!

Add/ Edit a custom content page

To add a content page, click “Add custom page” at the top of the page.

Enter the name you want, to be shown on the button on your mobile website start page in the field “Page name”. Select “Text” in the menu “Type”, and then add the text you want the new page to display.

To edit an existing text page, hover over the page name and you see a popup menu. In this menu, click “Edit”.

When you add a new page you have the choice of “Save” or “Save & Publish” at the bottom. To save a text page and immediately make it available in your mobile website, click “Save & Publish”. If you mean to come back to the item and add more detail later, click “Save”, and the item will be stored in Pocket Diner, but not yet shown to your mobile website visitors.

Add/ Edit a custom link

To add a link, click “Add custom page” at the top of the page.

Enter the name you want, to be shown on the button on your mobile website start page in the field “Page name”. Select “Link” in the menu “Type”, and then add the link you want to direct the visitor to. Don’t forget to start the link with “http://”!

To edit an existing link, hover over the page name and you see a popup menu. In this menu, click “Edit”.

When you add a new link you have the choice of “Save” or “Save & Publish” at the bottom. To save a link and immediately make it available in your mobile website, click “Save & Publish”. If you mean to come back to the item and add more detail later, click “Save”, and the item will be stored in Pocket Diner, but not yet shown to your mobile website visitors.

Publish/Unpublish a custom page

As mentioned above, pages can be saved in Pocket Diner but not yet visible in your mobile website.

Should you want to quickly remove a page from your mobile website, to update a few facts, you can first hover over the item and in the popup menu click “Unpublish”. You can then work with the item, correct any details, save it and after saving it click “Publish” in the popup menu to make it “live” in your Pocket Diner website.

Any unpublished items have a small red circle to the far left of their title, published items are green.

Custom pages: add button(s) to your main navigation freely

"Custom pages" allow you to create pages of text or links to other pages freely

There is a new section in the Pocket Diner Control Panel called “Custom pages”. Here you can add your own content pages, or links to pages not maintained in Pocket Diner, and buttons to the new items will be added to the main navigation on your Pocket Diner website start page. See the full documentation here.

Why is this good: you can now extend the content in your mobile website freely, adding any information, or links to other websites, that you like.

Example 1: if you are a restaurant in a hotel, and your web page actually is a sub page in the main hotel website, you can now add the Pocket Diner activation script only to the restaurant web page and link back to the main hotel website from your Pocket diner site.

Example 2: if you are running a promotion with someone else, or have events information on a different website, you can now add a button to your Pocket Diner website linking the visitor to that website.

Booking flow amended: extended support for Livebookings

The booking pages in your Pocket Diner mobile website now fully supports what is called “session messages” and “return times” as defined in your Livebookings restaurant reservation system.

Why is this good: more information to the diner makes them feel more comfortable about the reservation process.

Disable “near you” search form

Some Pocket Diner customers have more than one restaurant, but they are actually located in the same physical venue! When this happens, it doesn’t make sense to have the search function saying “show the restaurant closest to me”… So we have now made sure that if you fall into this category of Pocket Diner customers you can disable the “near you” search function in your Pocket Diner Control Panel.

Why is this good: this makes the Pocket Diner locations list and search experience make more sense for the visitors.

We hope you find this update useful! More good stuff to come, and if you have any suggestions or ideas, please send them to us!

Thanks to the wonders of technology this can be made to happen automatically, without any extra actions required from the web visitor.

To make this happen, your website needs to be amended with a “detection script”, a small snippet of code invisible to visitors, which makes sure that mobile users get the mobile website while all those using a desktop browser or tablet computer get to see your “normal” website with all its bells and whistles.

Pocket Diner website integration options

We provide three different ways to integrate your website with Pocket Diner:

• PHP
• .NET
• JavaScript

For a detailed technical explanation of the Pocket Diner integration, and download options for the three different options, see the “Detection script installation guide” on the Pocket Diner website.

Which integration option works best for you depends on the server solution used to run your website. To choose the right integration option, show your web developer to this page, and he will be able to work out what is required.

You edit your account options under "Settings" in your Pocket Diner Dashboard

When activating multiple price points in your account page, a new option shows up in the Control Panel navigation: “Price points”.

Under “Price points” you add options for your different price levels, and assign them to the appropriate locations.

Let’s for example say that you have five different locations. They all serve the same menu, but two of the restaurants charge more for certain dishes.

• Waterloo
• London Bridge
• Covent Garden
• Old Street
• King’s Cross

So you have two price points:

• Standard
• High

In the “Price points” section you first create the price point “Standard”, and assign these to the corresponding locations. Then you create the price point “High” and assign to the rest. Something like this:

• Waterloo – Standard
• London Bridge – High
• Covent Garden – High
• Old Street – Standard
• King’s Cross – Standard

What this now means is that when  you go to edit your menu, rather than one price field, you’ll see two: one for the “Standard” price point and one for the “High”. Add the different prices accordingly.

You will also find that in your mobile website, before a visitor can access your menu they have to pick a location! Pocket Diner will now show the correct price point when accessing the menu depending on which location was picked.

Neat huh?

You edit your account options under "Settings" in your Pocket Diner Dashboard

In your account settings you can edit your contact details (please keep these up to date), your password (please keep this safe) and control some of the behaviour of your Pocket Diner mobile website. Going through the  options from top to bottom:

Multiple price points

If you have  more than one restaurant location added to your Pocket Diner mobile website, tick this box and click “Save” to enable different price points in your menu for different locations. See a more detailed explanation.

Maintenance mode

If you ever find that something is seriously out of date on your mobile website, or you for some other reason want to temporarily “hide” it from public view, tick this box and click “Save”.

When in maintenance mode no mobile traffic is passed on to Pocket Diner, all visitors stay on your desktop website. If anyone  has saved a bookmark to your mobile website, they will only see a simple start page linking them to your desktop website.

This allows you to edit and rearrange content in Pocket Diner as much as you like with no risk of anyone seeing your edits. When complete, untick the box again to resume normal operation.

Account details

Should your contact details ever change you can update them here.

Change password

To change password, enter the new password exactly the same in the two password boxes and click “Save”.

Make sure to pick a password that is easy enough to remember for you, so you don’t have to write it down, but difficult to guess

Language

This menu controls the language used in your Pocket Diner Control Panel, as well as on your mobile website. If you set this to “Swedish (Sweden)”, your mobile web visitors will see a Swedish speaking website (note, the content you have added yourself doesn’t get automatically translated).

You find this option under "Settings" in your Pocket Diner Dashboard

Having a website means you have a virtual staff member presenting your restaurant to interested diners 365 days a year, 24/7. With an online reservations system from Livebookings you can make sure their reservation is only a click away!

Pocket Diner integrates with Livebookings, making sure that reservations from your desktop website, the Livebookings network of restaurant marketing partners, and your mobile website all go to the same place so you won’t be overbooked.

If you don’t have a real time reservation system from Livebookings, you can receive bookings via email.

To learn how to set up mobile reservations, see “Activate online reservations“

You find this option under "Settings" in your Pocket Diner Dashboard

In the section “Primary Navigation” in your Control Panel you can in detail manipulate the content on “home” page of your mobile website. Note: Pocket Diner is in itself clever enough to only show the buttons for which you have actually added content. If you for example don’t add anything in your “About us” section, that button will not show up.

Once you have completed all the content for the buttons you want to activate, by changing the naming on the buttons, and the order with which they are presented you can tailor the “home” page to your needs.

Use this opportunity to set the focus on the navigation options you want to highlight and think are the most important to your mobile diners.

Example:

If you have more than one restaurant you may want the “Find your nearest” button be at the very top of the navigation, followed by “Current offers” and “Book a table”.

If you have a single location, you may want to put “About us” at the top, followed by “Our food and drinks” and “Book a table”.

Changing the button labels

To change the text on a button, hover over the button label you want to change with your mouse, and you will see an “Edit” button show to the right. Click it, edit the name, click “Save”. Your change is automatically live on your mobile website.

Sorting the buttons

In the top right corners is a switch to toggle sorting “On” or “Off”. Click it, and you will see a small striped symbol show up on the right hand side of each button option. You can now click and drag the buttons to whichever order you prefer. When you are done, click the sorting control back to “Off” to save your changes, which immediately will be live on your mobile website.

You find this option under "Settings" in your Pocket Diner Dashboard

Under “Branding” in the Control Panel you can customise the visual look of Pocket Diner to match the branding of  your restaurant and normal website.

The advanced branding options let you change the page background and add image details specifically for iPhone app bookmark icon and app start-up screen. There are also a number of basic options allowing further customisation.

Please note: The advanced branding options allow you to make much finer tweaks to the look of your site. Be warned though, you will need reasonable knowledge of a commercial image editing software (such as Photoshop) to take full advantage. Alternatively, if you use have an external design agency then they’ll be fully capable of creating the required imagery. Also, you may notice all the image dimensions are larger than you’d expect – this is to cater for new high resolution screens such as the iPhone’s retina display, so bear this in mind when designing.

Adding a background image

The background image will sit on top of your background colour, and underneath your logo (see “Basic branding options” for how to change these settings).

Click the “Choose a file” button to browse to an image on your computer and upload it.

It can be a single, large, fixed image or a smaller image which you can set to tile (repeat) across the page.

We recommend you use an image of the format .gif, .jpg or .png.

With a width of 960 pixels (any height can be used depending on if you want it fixed or tiled), you get the best results.

Setting an iPhone bookmark image

If visitors choose to bookmark your mobile website on their iPhone, this is the image that will be used for the icon placed on their home screen.

Click the “Choose a file” button to browse to an image on your computer and upload it.

The nice little rounded corners and gloss effect are added automatically by the iPhone, so you just need to upload a standard square image.

We recommend you use an image of the format .gif, .jpg or .png.

With a width of 114 pixels, and a height of 114 pixels, you get the best results.

Setting an iPhone start-up image

If your mobile website is launched by an iPhone user tapping the bookmark on their home screen, this image will be shown while the site loads in fullscreen mode. If you don’t change this, a default start-up screen with a Pocket Diner logo will be used.

Click the “Choose a file” button to browse to an image on your computer and upload it.

We recommend you use an image of the format .gif, .jpg or .png.

With a width of 320 pixels, and a height of 460 pixels, you get the best results.

You find this option under "Settings" in your Pocket Diner Dashboard

Under “Branding” in the Control Panel you can customise the visual look of Pocket Diner to match the branding of  your restaurant and normal website.

The basic branding options allow for adding an image at the head of the mobile website (“Your logo”), and changing the background colour. There are also a number of advanced options allowing further customisation.

Adding your logo as a header image

To add a custom image at the top of every page of your mobile website, simply upload a suitable graphic under “Your logo”. Click the button “Choose a file” to browse to an image on your computer and upload it.

We recommend you use an image of the format .gif, .jpg or .png.

With a width of 640 pixels, and a height of 200 pixels, you get the best results.

Changing the background colour

By clicking in the colour setting field you will get a colour picker, where you can choose the colour you want.

If you know the exact RGB value, you can also type this in manually on the format “254,251,251″ (“R,G,B”).

You do this under “General settings” in your Control Panel.

Google Analytics

With the most commonly used package today being the completely free Google Analytics, we have made the configuration of this as simple as possible. All you need to do to activate Google Analytics for your Pocket Diner is to add your Google Analytics ID in the specifically labelled field.

You find your Google Analytics ID in the settings for your profile, for detailed instructions see this section in the Google Analytics Help. Your ID is the short string on the format UA-XXXXX-X.

Other web statistics packages

If you are not using Google Analytics, don’t worry, you can probably still get tracking of your Pocket Diner usage. For the package you use, look up the the actual code snippet that you would normally add to your website to activate the tracking.

Copy that snippet and paste all of it into the field labelled “Other tracking code”. Done!

Examples of other web statistics packages that work in this way are GetClicky, Mint and Statcounter.