Beaumont keeps hospital hours. The big teaching hospital on Beaumont Road takes patients from across the country and employs a huge staff on shifts that start at seven, finish at eight, and run through the night. Around it are the estates, Shantalla, Beaumont Woods and the roads off Beaumont Road, where families have lived for decades and where many of those staff rent or buy. A business here serves both: the nurse looking for coffee at six in the morning, and the family two roads away looking for a plumber, a childminder or a hairdresser. Website design in Beaumont has to allow for a customer whose day does not look like anyone else’s. We are based in Dublin and we meet Beaumont owners in person, at whatever hour the business keeps.
Two sets of customers
The hospital crowd is large and always changing. Staff rotate in from every county, patients’ families arrive from Donegal or Kerry for a week they did not plan, and none of them know Beaumont. They search from the car park, the ward and the bus stop: “pharmacy near Beaumont Hospital”, “cafe near Beaumont Hospital”, “taxi Beaumont”, “B&B near Beaumont”. They want distance, hours and a phone number, and they want them right now.
The residents are the opposite: settled, local, slow to switch. They find trades and services through neighbours, the parish, the schools and the local Facebook groups, then check the name on Google before ringing. For them a Beaumont business needs to look like it has been here a while and will still be here next year.
Hours that are not nine to five
For a cafe, a pharmacy, a chipper or a taxi firm in Beaumont, the single most useful thing a site does is tell the truth about hours. If you open at half six for the early shift, say so, and set it on Google so that “open now” searches at that hour find you. If you close for the bank holiday, set the special hours the week before. For the taxi firm, a tap-to-call button and a WhatsApp button beat any form.
Say how you relate to the hospital honestly: a five minute walk from the main entrance, or across from the bus stop on Beaumont Road. Give the D09 routing key with your Eircode so the pin lands on your door and not somewhere on the hospital campus. The Google listing carries the same facts; we set it up and verify it, and the guide on setting up a Google Business Profile in Ireland shows what goes into it.
Childminders, cleaners and taxis without a page
Beaumont has a lot of work done by people with no site at all: childminders and small creches full of hospital staff’s children, cleaners and ironing services, home-based hairdressers and beauticians, taxi drivers working for themselves. They have survived on word of mouth because the hospital keeps supplying new customers. A single page with the service, the hours, the area and a way to get in touch means that the new doctor searching at midnight finds you rather than a franchise. The checklist in what a small business website should include shows how little is actually needed.
What it costs
Essentials costs €499 to build and €50 a month to run, which includes hosting, the Google listing and changes by WhatsApp. Complete costs €1,499 to build and €100 a month to run, and adds bookings, payments, review requests and chat. See the pricing page for the full list, or the pharmacies page for how we build for a chemist.