Home page builder

Compose your venue’s public home page from a small set of building blocks — a hero banner, photo galleries, video, featured dishes, narrative sections, and a call-to-action banner. Drag to reorder, hide what’s not ready yet, save when you’re done.

For venue owners on the Rich layout. Available under Settings → Public Surface → Home page.

What it does

When a visitor lands on your venue URL (for example app.bitethemenu.com/your-slug or your custom domain), the page shows a home page rather than the menu directly. By default, that home page is built automatically — we pick a hero photo from your menu and show a short rail of your recommended dishes. It works, but it’s the same for every venue.

The home page builder lets you take that over. You decide what visitors see, in what order, with your own headlines, photos, video, and curated dish picks. Use it to tell your story (we’ve been in Phuket for 20 years), feature a tasting menu, link straight to a Book a Table page, or run a seasonal carousel of new dishes.

Once you add even one block, your custom home page replaces the automatic one. Remove all your blocks and the automatic version comes back — nothing is permanent.

How to use it

The builder lives at Settings → Public Surface → Home page. Open it and you’ll see either an empty state (with a big “Add your first block” button) or your existing block list.

Add a block

Tap + Add your first block (or + Add another block at the bottom of the list). A picker opens with the seven block types:

🌅 Hero — A big banner at the top, with a headline, an optional subhead, a background image or video, and an optional button.
🖼️ Image — A single photo, either full-width edge-to-edge or centered with rounded corners.
🎬 Video — A short clip (MP4 or WebM), with optional caption.
🎞️ Carousel — A slideshow of images and short videos that rotates on its own (or with arrow buttons).
⭐ Featured menu items — You pick specific dishes and they appear as a grid of cards.
📝 Text section — A heading and a paragraph — for your story, an announcement, a press quote, anything.
📣 Call-to-action banner — A wide banner with a headline and a single button — perfect for “Book a table”, “Call us”, or “Order online”.

Pick one and a new block appears at the bottom of your list, ready to edit.

Edit a block

Tap Edit on a block row. The card expands to show the editor for that block type. Most blocks have:

Headline / heading — the big text. Type once in your primary language; if you have translations turned on, you’ll see one field per language.
Subhead / caption — the smaller text underneath (always optional).
Image or video — tap Upload to pick a file. Photos up to about 10 MB. Videos: MP4 or WebM up to 50 MB (around 5 minutes of 720p). HEIC photos from iPhones are converted to JPEG automatically.
Button label + Where the button goes — only on hero and call-to-action blocks. The “where” is a dropdown of safe targets: your menu, your About page, your Contact page, your What’s On page, an email link, or a phone call. We don’t accept free-text URLs — too easy to make a typo and break the link.

Tap Save block when you’re done. Changes don’t go live until you save.

Reorder, hide, and delete

Reorder — Grab the ⠿ handle on the left of a block and drag it up or down.
Hide — Tap the toggle on the right to hide a block from visitors without deleting it. Useful for staging a block that’s not ready yet, or temporarily pulling a seasonal banner without losing the work.
Delete — Tap Delete, then Delete? to confirm. Removing all your blocks brings back the automatic home page.

Preview your work

The Preview public site ↗ button at the top right opens your live home page in a new tab. Saved changes show up immediately — no separate “publish” step.

What happens behind the scenes

Each block is its own row in the system, with its own settings. When you save a block, only that row is updated — nothing else on your venue (your menu, your hours, your other blocks) is touched. That makes saves fast and small.

When a visitor opens your home page, the system loads your blocks in the order you set, skips any you’ve hidden, and renders them top to bottom. If you’ve featured specific dishes that have since been deleted or hidden in your menu, those dishes are silently skipped from the grid — you won’t see broken cards.

The same content can be shown in every language you’ve turned on. We use your primary language as the fallback when a translation is missing for the visitor’s language, then English, then the first non-empty value — so no visitor ever sees a blank headline.

The home page builder is part of the paid plan. It only affects the Rich layout — venues on Simple or Smart layouts see no change.

Examples

🌅 A welcome story — Add a Hero with a wide kitchen photo and a one-line tagline (“Authentic Northern Thai, slow-cooked”), then a Text section telling the story of how the restaurant started, then a Featured menu items block showing the four signature dishes, then a CTA banner with “Book a table” pointing to your Contact page.
🎞️ Seasonal launch — Add a Carousel at the top with three new dishes (photos + captions), then your usual Hero below it. Hide the Carousel after launch week — your old layout comes back without rebuilding it.
📞 Takeaway-focused — Hero with a phone-icon image, a CTA banner with “Call us to order” → tel: link, a Featured items block of your top sellers. Skip the long story; visitors are here to order.
⚠️ A dish you featured got deleted — The featured items block just stops showing that one card. The rest of the grid still renders. Edit the block to pick a replacement when you have a moment.

Theme settings — pick your layout (Simple / Smart / Rich) and brand colors. The home page builder only affects the Rich layout.
Site settings — your custom domain, page titles, social-share preview image.
Photos and videos — same upload rules and formats as the menu photo gallery.