But probably the most noticable difference is the addition of the Edinburgh - Inspiring Capital logo. We’re proud to be an Edinburgh-based website, rather than one of the many national or international consumer review sites you find cluttering up the internet. Our knowledge of Edinburgh is what makes us stand out from all those other websites that just rip all their business listings out of Thomson Local!

In other news 

We’ve tweaked a couple of other bits other site recently, to make navigating around the site a bit quicker and easier:

• If you search for a business and get exactly 1 match, rather than show you the search results, we’ll just send you straight to the listing for that business.
• If you hover over the link to a business anywhere on the site (eg. in the recent reviews on the home page) you’ll get a popup giving you a map and basic details about that business.
• We’ve added a list of similar businesses nearby below the map on the listing page for each business.

And that’s about it for now. More new features currently being worked on, as always! As ever, let us know if you have any comments on the new features or if there’s anything you’d like added.

The only slight problem with booking through toptable and 5pm is that they are a middle man - they contact the restaurant on your behalf and you get confirmation of the booking a little later. This works well and 99% of the time there is not a problem, but wouldn’t it be perfect if you could get immediate confirmation that your table is reserved just as surely as if you phoned the restaurant yourself?

Well now you can! You know how lots of restaurants have fancy electronic reservation systems that manage all of their bookings? We’ve teamed up with one of the companies providing that service to lots of Edinburgh restaurants to provide an instant online booking system that immediately saves your booking into their reservation system, making it impossible for your table to be reserved for anyone else. This system works really nicely, and is currently in use by some of Edinburgh’s busiest and most highly regarded restaurants like Vittoria, La P’tite Folie, The Stockbridge Restaurant, Creelers and Britannia Spice.

New special offers section

As a number of the restaurants that use our direct online reservation system also have 5pm and toptable offers, to stop the listing pages getting too cluttered with options for how to book your meal, we’ve moved a lot of the offers off the main part of each listing page - they’re now listed down the side of the page. To make up for this, we’ve created a whole new special offers section. This also allows you to easily see only the businesses that currently have special offers running and you can also list them by proximity to any location in Edinburgh. We think this is going to be a popular feature!

Along with the partnership we already have running with 5pm.co.uk, it’s now possible to book online at almost every restaurant in Edinburgh that has an online booking facility from EdinburghMenus.com. All the businesses where it’s possible to book a table online have been tagged with “bookonline” so they can be searched for easily or if you just want to see all the toptable businesses, they’ve been tagged with “toptable” too.

A few of the toptable businesses also have special offers available when you book online. We’ve been getting our hands dirty with SOAP (hahaha) to pull in these toptable offers using their API as we do with the 5pm offers. So you can browse all the available offers from toptable and 5pm without leaving the comfort of EdinburghMenus.com! There’s loads more we can do with toptable’s excellent API (like checking for table availability) and we’ll incorporate this into EdinburghMenus.com when we get a chance.

When we did get the site live, we didn’t think we had enough footage to put the ad together and it was forgotten about. Well, it turns out we did have enough footage - just - so we’ve thrown something together.

The music is “I’m So Happy” by the 10 man Edinburgh-based ska outfit, Bombskare. Used with their permission, of course - thanks guys!

Hope you like it. Here’s the YouTube version - pretty rubbish quality - you can download higher quality versions below.

The video was shot on a Canon DSLR and put together in full HD 720p widescreen. If you want to see it in its full glory, we’d highly recommend downloading the full version. You’ll need the DivX codec installed on your machine to view it (the excellent VLC player should definitely play it if you’re not sure).

• 720p DivX (26.6mb)

We’ve also created a bunch of other versions of the advert optimised for various platforms - knock yourselves out.

• Windows Media Player (9.0mb; good if you don’t have the DivX codec)
• Video IPod (4.0mb)
• Sony PSP (4.1mb)
• Mobile phone (low) (0.9mb; for old phones that don’t play MP4 video)
• Mobile phone (high) (2.3mb; for new phones that play MP4 video)

Now, anyone got a few hundred grand spare so we can stick this on prime-time ITV? Failing that, please email the link to this blog article or the YouTube video around your friends to spread the word!

If you’ve heard of 5pm.co.uk, you’ll know that it’s a great place to look to book a table at a restaurant in Edinburgh at a knock-down price.

The title of this post is just a joke - we never intended to be a direct competitor to 5pm, who provide a full table booking service. Our emphasis is on reviews and information on restaurants in Edinburgh. So in order to increase the amount of information and the usefulness of EdinburghMenus.com, we have teamed up with 5pm.co.uk making it possible to see restaurant offers from 5pm on EdinburghMenus.com and click through to their site to book a table online.

There are currently 74 restaurants in Edinburgh with 5pm offers. All restaurants with 5pm offers have been tagged “5pm” so you can easily track them down on EdinburghMenus.com. Want to see French restaurants with 5pm.co.uk offers near the Omni Centre? Try this. Or All 5pm offers near the Kings Theatre? Try this.

We hope you find this service useful. We’ll shortly add an offers section to the site so you can see a variety of offers available from 5pm.co.uk. If you have any comments on it, as always, just leave a comment here or contact us directly.

As EdinburghMenus.com went live at the end of June 2007 (the 25th to be precise), we thought that the end of 2007 would be a good time to take a look at out progress as it is 6 months since we went live.

Overall, the site has been doing well. After 6 months we have accumulated well over 600 independent user reviews and 871 businesses listed on the site. In the first few months, traffic to the site was predictably very low - we had no marketing budget and planned for the site to become popular through getting higher and higher up in Google results and by word of mouth. As you can see from our Google Analytics graph below, we have been getting steadily more traffic throughout 2007. At launch, we were attracting between 15 and 25 visitors per day but in the run up to Christmas over 250 were visiting daily - even 34 people managed to drag themselves away from The Queen’s Speech and new toys to visit on Christmas Day!

We’ve got a great big list of new features we want to add to the site and we plan on rolling those out as soon as possible. Keep an eye on this blog for updates!

Just now the image you upload to go with your profile must be in jpeg format. The image will be automatically resized and cropped to 120 pixels square.

If you choose not to upload an image, rather than assigning you an image of a silhouette of a person or a question mark as other websites do, there will just be no image. This is a much more polite way of doing things, if you ask us.

Merry Christmas!

But not any more! Now, when you see a sketch beside a review, you can click on it and the canvas will clear and the sketch will redraw itself, exactly as its creator did originally - errors and all. Pretty pointless, but fun!

For the techies among you, this feature is brought to you by Adobe Flash and the jQuery JavaScript library. If you don’t have Flash and JavaScript enabled, you’ll still see the final static version of the sketch.

And so the sketch feature further extends its lead as the least used feature with the most development time spent on it…

EdinburghMenus.com has partnered with just-eat.co.uk to provide this service. There are currently 13 businesses offering this service with more being added all the time. To order online, just click the “order online now” link on the listing page for that business on EdinburghMenus.com. You will then be directed to just-eat.co.uk’s secure online ordering system where you can choose what you want to eat and pay securely by credit card.

The businesses that offer online ordering through just-eat.co.uk have been tagged “justeat” and “orderonline” so you can search for them easily. Try searching for “justeat indian” near “Newington” (try it now) or “orderonline” near “the zoo” (try it now) to get an idea of how to find the business you want.

We’re not sure. What we’ve done is add a caveat to the top of each review to warn readers that the review was written before the business rebranded. That way visitors get to read the (informative and sometimes entertaining) reviews while also being made aware that the content does not necessarily reflect on the current state of the business.

Is this the right approach? Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment here or by contacting us.