Bray is two towns that share a name. Main Street runs the length of the town from the Dargle bridge up to the old Town Hall, and it is where Bray people do their everyday business: pharmacies, butchers, barbers, phone shops, solicitors, old pubs. Quinsborough Road drops from Main Street to the DART station and the sea, and once you cross the railway you are in the other Bray: the promenade, the hotels and chippers and amusements along the seafront, the harbour at the north end and Bray Head at the south with the cross on top and the cliff walk towards Greystones.
One Bray is busiest in July. The other is busy all year. Website design in Bray has to know which one you are in. A seafront cafe needs to be found by a day tripper who stepped off the DART and typed “coffee near me”. A plumber in Ballywaltrim needs to be found by a Bray family at nine on a wet Tuesday in February. Bray is outside Dublin, so for us the first chat is a phone or video call rather than a visit, and everything after that works exactly as it does for a Dublin client: changes by WhatsApp, a report by email each month, a site you can edit yourself.
How Bray finds a business
Bray is the biggest town in Wicklow and it behaves like one. There is enough choice that people compare. They search “barber Bray”, “physio Bray”, “dog groomer Bray”, look at the three names on the map and read the reviews, then ring or book. Bray Facebook groups are busy, and a question about a reliable electrician gets answers fast, but the names in those answers are googled before anyone rings.
Then there is the visitor trade. On a fine Sunday the DART empties onto the promenade and every one of those people has a phone. They search for food, for coffee, for ice cream, for how long the cliff walk takes. When the air display is on, the seafront is packed. A seafront business that is not on Google Maps with correct hours and photos is invisible to all of them.
Hours, seasons and the A98 routing key
A Bray site needs to carry the town name, the county and the A98 routing key in the right places, matched exactly to the Google Business Profile. It needs hours that change when the season does, because a seafront cafe that Google says is open at 8pm in November, when it closed at 4pm, earns one star reviews from people who walked down for nothing. With the self-edit page you change the hours yourself in a minute.
Transport notes earn their place too: the DART station, the Dublin Bus routes in along the N11, parking on the seafront versus Main Street. For trades covering the wider area, name Greystones, Enniskerry, Shankill, Kilmacanogue and Delgany in plain sentences so Google knows your patch.
B&Bs, salons and trainers running on Instagram
A lot of Bray’s seafront guesthouses live on the booking sites, paying commission on every room. Salons and nail bars on Main Street fill the book through Instagram messages. Personal trainers on the promenade post their morning classes to stories. Each of those works until it doesn’t: the booking site changes its terms, Instagram changes its feed, and the business has no page of its own for the customer to land on. A site you own, with direct bookings and deposits, is the fix, and we have written about how to take deposits online in Ireland for exactly this.
Plans and price
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings with deposits, card and Apple Pay payments, chat, review requests after each visit and monthly Google work. Everything each plan includes is on the pricing page, and the trades we build for are listed under websites for.