Our first theme, 'Elevate'

Getting Easy Eatery ready for early access would be an immense understatement to say we've had a busy couple of weeks. We've rigorously tested every single part of Easy Eatery, and whilst it's been exhausting, I'm incredibly proud of how it's all shaping up.

Most of our energy over the past week has been put into testing and optimising the front-end of Easy Eatery to ensure that our websites load as quickly as they possibly can.

Because we've made so many under-the-hood changes to Easy Eatery's front end, the themes we have built to date are no longer compatible. To help us get everything tested, we needed to create a new theme.

Meet our starter theme — 'Elevate.'

Elevate is the theme that'll be installed on every new Easy Eatery website by default. It's a clean and contemporary theme that'll be an ideal starting point for any café, pub or restaurant.

Make any Easy Eatery theme your own

We're designing Elevate — and every other theme that follows — to be fully responsive and accessible. Just as important, however, is that every theme be customisable — with or without making code changes.

Our goal is to make it easy for anyone — regardless of their level of experience — to customise their website's theme. We've added several options to allow anyone to make simple changes to their theme so that it stands apart from others using the same one.

Without making code changes, you can:

• Update the theme's colour scheme to match your brand
• Change all of the theme's fonts (powered by Google Fonts)
• Tweak the text sizes throughout the theme
• Add your logo & favicon

And as every Easy Eatery theme will be different, we've added support for custom options on a theme-by-theme basis, for example:

• Elevate will allow the site owner to disable the rounded corners that appear on several elements throughout the theme.

Go deeper into customisation with our developer tools.

Creating this new theme has enabled us to test our theme editor thoroughly. As a result, we've identified several areas that needed improvement, all of which have been updated accordingly.

The above image isn't some mockup of what we're hoping to build at some point. It's a real screenshot of our theme editor running on our pre-release version of Easy Eatery.

While we're eager to make all our themes customisable without code changes, we're equally keen to support web designers and developers who want to go a little deeper into customisation or create their own theme from scratch.

Easy Eatery's powerful developer tools will allow people with experience in editing HTML, CSS and JavaScript to do exactly that:

• Our theme editor grants you full access to your theme's source code, allowing you to make changes as you see fit. It also provides automatic asset merge & minification tools for CSS and JavaScript files.
• Our page blocks manager gives the ability to extend our page builder with custom layout blocks.

We'll be talking more about our developer tools in an upcoming post. Still, I wanted to use this opportunity to quickly stress how important Easy Eatery is to be as customisable and developer-friendly as possible.

Setting the standard for things to come.

The Elevate theme is just the start. We'll be designing every theme to match or exceed the standards set by Elevate — and our custom themes provided as a part of early access are no exception to this.

We want our early access customers to be a shining example of what Easy Eatery can achieve. You can be confident we'll be putting maximum effort into the custom themes we create in early access.

Our early access programme is now accepting applications.

See Elevate for yourself:

I believe the best way to get a feel for our starter theme is to see it yourself, so I've shared the Figma prototype for the Elevate theme for you to explore right here.

This isn't an actual Easy Eatery website, for the record - it's a semi-interactive prototype that isn't responsive, so it won't scale down to mobile devices.

It also doesn't show everything we have in store for Easy Eatery.

If the design doesn't fit your screen correctly on desktop, you can click into the preview and hit the 'Z' key on your keyboard until the prototype zooms to fit your browser.