Ballymun was rebuilt from the ground up. The towers are gone, the last of them came down in 2015, and the Main Street that replaced them has the Axis arts centre, the civic centre, housing on both sides and shop units at street level. Behind the street are the five neighbourhoods, Poppintree, Balcurris, Sillogue, Shangan and Coultry, and that is where most Ballymun businesses actually live: in a van outside the house, a salon chair in a converted front room, a takeaway on a corner.
Website design in Ballymun has to start from that reality rather than from the street. Plenty of good trades here have never had a page of their own because they never needed one. We are based in Dublin and we come out to you, to the shop or to wherever the van is parked that morning, and we build from what you tell us in ten minutes.
The recommendation still travels by name
Ballymun is one of the few parts of the city where word of mouth does most of the work. People know each other, Ballymun Kickhams is a hub, and the local Facebook groups are where someone asks for a plumber or a painter and gets a dozen replies by teatime.
That is good news for anyone with a name here, but it is not the whole picture. The person who got your name from a neighbour still types it into Google before they ring. If what comes up is a Facebook page last updated years ago, some of them ring the next name on the list. And the newer arrivals, in the apartments on Main Street and in the newer estates, do not have a neighbour to ask yet. They search “barber Ballymun” or “electrician Dublin 11” and pick from the map.
A trade based here works half the northside
The M50 at the top of the Ballymun Road puts Finglas, Santry, Glasnevin, Swords and the airport within easy reach, and most Ballymun trades spend their week across all of them. Your site should say that plainly: a base in Ballymun, then the places you drive to, named one by one, so that Google can match you to a search from Santry as well as from Sillogue.
Ballymun sits across Dublin 9 and Dublin 11, so the routing keys D09 and D11 both turn up in local addresses. We set the Google Business Profile up as a service area business where that suits, which keeps your home address private while the areas you cover stay clear. DCU is next door too, and students looking for a cheap haircut, a takeaway or a gym search the same way everyone else does, on the phone and in a hurry.
Hair, nails and food on Instagram alone
The Ballymun businesses most often without a site are the ones doing well: home salons and nail techs booked out through Instagram messages, barbers on Main Street with a Facebook page and a landline, takeaways that exist only inside the delivery apps. Each of them is paying a toll to someone else’s platform, and none of them shows up when a new tenant searches “nails near me” in Google Maps.
A proper page does not replace Instagram. It gives you what Instagram cannot: a result on Google with your hours, your price list, your photos and a book button, on a .ie domain registered in your name. It also gives AI tools like ChatGPT something factual to read when someone asks them for a barber near DCU. If reviews are the part you have been putting off, our guide on getting more Google reviews is the place to start.
Two plans, no contract
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month for the site, hosting, the domain and a verified Google Business Profile. Complete, at €1,499 and €100 a month, adds online bookings, card and Apple Pay payments, a chat assistant and monthly work on your Google listing. The detail is on the pricing page, and what we build for each kind of trade is under websites for.