Athlone is one town in two counties. The east bank, with Church Street, the Towncentre, the station and the TUS campus on the Dublin road, is Westmeath. The west bank, the Left Bank around the castle and Sean’s Bar, Custume Barracks, and the estates and industrial parks of Monksland beyond, is Roscommon. The Shannon runs between and the bridge joins them, and the whole lot shares the N37 Eircode and calls itself Athlone. That is the first thing website design in Athlone has to get right, because a business in Monksland that writes “Co. Roscommon” in its titles and nothing else will not be found by the person searching “Athlone”. We build Athlone sites from Dublin. We have no office here; we start on a video or phone call, you send photos and details by WhatsApp, and the site is built from them.
Which side of the bridge are you on?
An Athlone customer wants to know which bank you are on before anything else, because crossing the town at five o’clock takes longer than it should. A site for a shop, a salon or a clinic should say it plainly, Left Bank, Church Street, the Dublin road, Monksland, and where the car goes, whether that is the Towncentre car park, the street or your own yard. The Google Business Profile needs the pin on the right door, the N37 Eircode, and the same address written the same way as on the site. A Monksland business should say “Athlone” in its titles and “Monksland, Co. Roscommon” in its address, and let both be true.
Students, shoppers and boats
Three different crowds search in Athlone. The TUS students arrive in September, new to the town, and need a barber, a gym, a chipper, a phone screen replaced, a dentist for the emergency. They search Google Maps from the campus and go to the nearest place with photos and hours. The shoppers come from Roscommon, Longford, east Galway and Offaly, because Athlone is the retail town for all of them, and they search “nails Athlone” or “restaurant Athlone” from the car before they set off and book what they find. And in summer the boats come up the Shannon and tie up below the castle, full of people who want a table at seven and a taxi at eleven.
None of those people ask a neighbour. A restaurant or a salon that lets them book from the page takes the booking that a phone ringing out would have lost; the options are in how to take online bookings. And because Athlone has choice, reviews decide more than they do in a smaller town. Answering the bad ones well is covered in how to reply to bad Google reviews.
What an Athlone page needs to say
The hours, including bank holidays. The prices, or from-prices for a garage or a clinic. Real photos, not stock. The bank and the parking. For a trade working out of Athlone, the towns: Moate, Glasson, Ballinasloe, Roscommon town, Ballymahon, each in a sentence, so that a search from Ballinasloe finds an Athlone electrician who actually goes there. Ericsson, the barracks and the college are the employers everyone knows, and a cafe or a gym near one of them should say so.
Food, hair and fitness on Instagram
Athlone’s cafes post the specials to stories, the nail and brow studios book through messages, the trainers and the yoga teachers put the timetable on a grid. The follower sees it. The student who arrived last week, the family that moved into Monksland in the spring and the couple off the boat do not, and never will, because they search Google and Instagram is not what Google shows them for “brows Athlone”. A page of your own, with the booking and the prices, is what connects the account to the people who have not found it yet.
Plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month with bookings and deposits, card and Apple Pay payments, chat, review requests and monthly Google work. The pricing page has the detail; the restaurants page shows what a restaurant site includes.