The New Orleans Menu is the leading food website in the New Orleans area. Every month, it's visited over 250,000 times by 85,000 readers. Those are our June 2012 numbers, which involve none of the trickery web sites use to make a single visit count as dozens. They range from gourmets to gourmet wannabes. Lifelong locals to avid visitors. Young and old.

What unites them is enough of an interest in New Orleans food that a large percentage of them actually pay to get the daily NOMenu newsletter. It first appeared online in 1997, making it by far the longest-running food website in town. NOMenu is also the biggest in terms of content, with over 5000 current articles).

The New Orleans Menu began as a print magazine twenty years before going online. Unlike most early websites, it wasn't a static page promising great things in future, but one with a news-packed daily edition of new information, backed up by many years' worth of first-hand, detailed, up-to-date reviews and hundreds of recipes developed in our own kitchen.

And--most useful of all, our readers tell us--a lot of lists. Those got the attention of the national media when, after Hurricane Katrina, NOMenu reported on and encouraged the heroic return of the New Orleans dining community. NOMenu's list of open restaurants became (and still is) the definitive index of dining out in the area. Its 500 detailed restaurant reports is more than any single publication has ever published at one time in one place.

Many other national and local webjobs claiming to cover New Orleans dining have come on the scene since then. Almost all of them get their information either by pulling it up from business directories by automation, or by running unsigned "reviews" from anonymous posters whose motivations are unknown.

That's not good enough for us. Like great restaurants, we cook up our product by hand, fresh daily. We experience the restaurants and recipes in person, not by rumor.

Like the web itself, advertising in the pages of NOMenu brings many advantages over traditional advertising media. The Column ads (see the sample at right) come across as articles, in the frank style of the rest of the website. We know our readers can see through hype, and they appreciate that even our ads avoid that.

The payback? Loyalty and believability. Most of our readers spend ten minutes or so with NOMenu every time they visit. Why? Content. They find at least five new articles every weekday, about the restaurants and cookery they know they'll enjoy.

We will write and design the ad at no extra cost, or you can do it yourself or through your creative agency. Two kinds of ads are available in The New Orleans Menu:

Column ads (as at right) run vertically down the side of the web page, one on top of the other. They have the advertiser's logo or other art at the top, and a text section by our writers. They are 222 pixels wide. There is no set length. The copy can be as long as it needs to be, within reason.

Banners (like the one at the top of this page) run horizontally above site's pages, all the way across. Their size is set at 780 pixels wide by 112 pixels deep. (The size on the screen varies according to how the reader has his screen set up.) If you are making up your own ad, please use these dimensions exactly.

Technical Specifications
Digital art for everything--from a logo to a photo to an entire ad--should be sent to us in JPG, TIFF, BMP, or AI format, 300 dpi. We'd be happy to scan your printed artwork, but it must be of the best quality, with a clear background. Copy should be sent in a standard text format.

Rates
NOMenu's ad rates depend on where and how many ads you run, but most of them are all over the site, in rotation so they appear next to different articles each time the reader moves through the site. Here are the typical monthly rates:

Banner Ads. . . $75o
Column Ads, Top Half Of Page . . . $500
Column Ads, Bottom Half Of Page . . . $350

If you have any questions about the specifications, please call 985-898-3540. For more information about starting an ad in NOMenu. call Mary Ann Fitzmorris: 985-705-1947.

We think you'll be as pleased as our many other successful advertisers have been.