Ballina’s calendar starts with the river. The Moy salmon season runs from February to the end of September, the Ridge Pool sits in the middle of town below the bridge, and anglers from Germany, Britain and the north of Ireland book their week on the water months ahead, usually in the depths of winter, from a kitchen table a long way away. They book the beat, then the bed, then the dinner, and they do all of it online. A B&B or a pub in Ballina that cannot be found and booked from abroad in January is missing the people who keep the town going in June. That is the first thing website design in Ballina has to understand. We handle it from Dublin: a phone or video call to start, your photos and details sent over, and WhatsApp for every change after that.
A town for the whole of north Mayo
Ballina is the business town for the north of the county. Pearse Street and Tone Street are the shopping streets, the Jackie Clarke Collection sits on Pearse Street, Belleek Woods runs along the river north of the town, and the two big manufacturing plants on the edge employ people from every parish around. Killala, Crossmolina, Foxford, Bonniconlon and Knockmore all shop here, and so does Enniscrone across the estuary in Sligo, whose beach is the closest thing Ballina has to a seaside. The branch line brings the train in from Manulla Junction, and the N26 and N59 bring everyone else.
For a trade that means the service area is wide and the county line does not matter. A builder in Ballina works Enniscrone and Easkey in Sligo as naturally as Crossmolina, and the site should say so town by town.
Found from Germany and from Bonniconlon
The angler and the farmer’s wife in Bonniconlon are using the same Google. Both need the site to say Ballina, Co. Mayo plainly, to carry the F26 Eircode, to show hours that are true and a phone number that dials when tapped. The angler also wants to know about the river: whether you do early breakfasts, whether there is somewhere to dry waders, how far you are from the Ridge Pool. The local wants to know whether you are open on the Saturday of the Salmon Festival in July. Both are questions a page can answer and a Facebook post cannot, because Google reads one and not the other.
Your Google Business Profile does half the work on the map, and setting it up properly is part of Essentials. We have written a plain guide to setting up a Google Business Profile in Ireland if you want to see what is involved.
Who is still only on Facebook
Around Ballina the ghillies and fishing guides, the agricultural contractors, the mechanics working from a shed at home, the butchers and the bakers with a loyal town trade mostly have a Facebook page and a phone, and most of them are busy enough that it has never seemed to matter. The person it fails is the newcomer: the engineer who moved here for a job at one of the plants, the family who bought a house in Killala, the angler on his first trip. A page of your own, with the service area, the prices and photographs of actual work or actual fish, is what reaches them. Deposits matter for the guides and the B&Bs especially, and how to take deposits online in Ireland covers what is fair under Irish consumer rules.
Price
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and includes the bookings and deposits that a B&B or a guide needs, plus monthly work on the Google listing. The pricing page has the full list, and the rural and tourism trades we build for are under websites for.