Menulog talks Chrome extensions at DevFest today

Editor's note: We are pleased to welcome guest blogger Gary Munitz, general manager of Menulog Pty Ltd. Gary heads the team responsible for Menulog’s online marketing, web/mobile development both locally and internationally as well as their online affiliate network. Gary’s background includes over 13 years experience in IT and online marketing and has been involved in key roles in launching a number of successful start ups. He is speaking today at our Sydney DevFest.

Menulog.com.au allows customers to get food delivered from over 1000 restaurants across the country making us Australia’s largest and most comprehensive online restaurant ordering system. Our website boasts 2000+ specials, is free for customers to use, allows customers to pay the restaurant with cash or credit and offers instant confirmation.

All of this amounts to nothing if no one knows you exist. Accordingly we are always looking for cost effective ways to promote our product to the right audience. The right audience for an online product are consumers who are already online - simple.

We already invest significantly in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and these are great tools when a customer is actively looking for your product. But how does one get in front of the right audience when they are not actively looking for you at that exact time?

Offline media is an option – an expensive option – but an option nonetheless. You can spend thousands of dollars and hope that the people you are marketing to both want your product and use the Internet and remember your product when they are next in front of a computer.

Another option was a Google Chrome extension. Our extension gives our customers instant access to see the restaurants that deliver to their area, special deals nearby and popular food items without having to navigate away from the website they are currently browsing. This allows Menulog.com.au to promote their brand to the right audience throughout the day whilst they are ‘surfing’ any website. Our Google Chrome extension also highlights at different times during the day, gently reminding our customers that it is time to place their home/office delivery order. Our next version will also be pushing out great deals giving even better value for our customers.

Moreover, the technology is simple and straight forward to understand making it easy to roll out and maintain. Extensions are essentially mini websites and give developers the same type of control. Prior to the development of our extension, we created a web service that returned a JSON response of relevant data. The extension itself is a basic HTML page that uses AJAX to make the web service calls back to our server and display the JSON response. The final code bundle is then zipped (together with a manifest to manage a few extra settings) and uploaded to the Google Chrome extensions developer area.

Posted by Gary Munitz, Menulog