A plumber in Ardee has a week that looks like a map of mid Louth. Monday a boiler in Collon, Tuesday a bathroom in a new estate on the edge of Dundalk, Wednesday two calls in Drogheda, Thursday a farmhouse out towards Tallanstown, Friday back in town on Castle Street. The N2 and the N52 cross here, so Ardee is about twenty minutes from both of the county’s big towns and not much further from Kells and Carrickmacross, and its trades work all of that ground. Website design in Ardee is mostly for people like that plumber: a van, a phone, a patch that takes in four towns and a hundred townlands, and a Facebook page only the regulars ever see. We are based in Dublin and we work with Ardee businesses remotely. The first chat is a video or phone call, then WhatsApp, and the site is built from the photos and details you send us. We do not have an office in Ardee or anywhere else in Louth.
The crossroads is the point
Being in the middle used to mean passing trade on the main street. The N2 now runs past the edge of the town rather than down the middle of it, and the main street, Castle Street running into Market Street with two medieval castles still standing on it, is a working town’s street: pubs, hairdressers, a pharmacy, a hardware shop, a bookmaker, and the shops that serve the farms around. For those businesses the crossroads means something different now. Customers come from every direction, and most of them do not live in Ardee. They live in Collon, Dunleer, Louth village, Tallanstown, Knockbridge or on a farm between, and they decide whether to drive to Ardee, Drogheda or Dundalk by looking at a phone first.
Drogheda, Dundalk and Dublin all pull at Ardee
Ardee’s people commute three ways: south to Dublin on the M1 from Dunleer or down the N2, east to Drogheda, north to Dundalk. They search for trades and services from wherever they happen to be, so a search for “electrician Ardee” might come from a desk in Dublin at lunchtime as easily as from a kitchen on the edge of town. The site has to say where you are and how far you go, in plain words: based in Ardee, Co. Louth, A92, working Drogheda, Dundalk, Collon, Dunleer, Carrickmacross and the farms between. Google matches a search from Dunleer to a page that mentions Dunleer. It does not guess.
Set the Google Business Profile up as a service area business if you work from home, with those towns listed, and make sure the name, address and phone match the site to the letter. Our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile in Ireland walks through every step.
Farms, machinery and the trades nobody searches for until they need them
Mid Louth is tillage, dairy and beef, and the town has the machinery repair, fencing, agricultural contracting and fuel supply trades that go with it. Their regulars have the number saved. Their new customers, the family who bought the old farmhouse, the hobby farmer with a broken topper, the Dublin couple who need a septic tank sorted before the sale closes, have never heard of them and search “machinery repair Louth” or “fencing contractor Ardee”. A page that lists what you fix, the makes you work on and the places you travel to, with a photo of the yard and a number, is all it takes to be the one they ring. What a small business website should include is a checklist for exactly that kind of business.
Plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month and covers the site, the domain in your name, hosting, the Google listing and small changes by WhatsApp. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, review requests, chat and monthly local pages for the towns you cover. The pricing page sets out both, and the plumbers page shows what we build for a trade that works out of a van.