Clonakilty is a food town before it is anything else. The black pudding made here is in every supermarket in the country, and around it has grown a town of bakers, butchers, cheese makers, chocolate makers, a distillery, delis, cafes and restaurants that treat local produce as the normal thing rather than a selling point. Pearse Street and Ashe Street, with their painted shopfronts, carry most of that trade, with Rossa Street, Emmet Square and Astna Square around them. In summer the road out to Inchydoney fills with families bound for the beach, and the Model Railway Village and the pier at Ring have their own traffic. Website design in Clonakilty, for most of the businesses we talk to, comes down to one thing: people arrive here having heard of the town and its food, they search for it, and the places that answer the search are the ones that get them. We are based in Dublin and we work with Clonakilty businesses remotely, by video call and then WhatsApp, with the site built from the photos and details you send us. We have no office in West Cork.
Producers who sell everywhere except on their own page
A lot of Clonakilty’s food is made by small producers who sell at the market, to shops and restaurants across West Cork, and by post to people who tasted it on holiday. Most have an Instagram account full of good photographs and no website, or a website from years ago with a shop that no longer works. That loses the Dublin customer who wants to order a box for Christmas and the deli in Cork city checking whether you are still trading. A page with what you make, where to buy it and a way to order fixes both. An online shop is an add-on we quote first; the page itself is in every plan.
Summer visitors, winter locals
From June to September the town is full of people who are here for Inchydoney, the Model Railway Village, the music and the food, and who search for all of it from a phone on Pearse Street: “lunch Clonakilty”, “B&B Clonakilty”, “live music tonight Clonakilty”. The rest of the year the trade is the town’s own and the farms around it, people who know the shops by name but still check the hours on Google before driving in from Rosscarbery on a wet Tuesday. One page serves both if the hours are right, the photos are real and the Google Business Profile matches the page, with the P85 routing key on both. Reviews count double in a town that visitors choose from a screen, and our guide to getting more Google reviews is the honest way to build them.
Pubs, B&Bs and the trades on Facebook alone
Clonakilty’s pubs with music, its B&Bs and holiday lets, its hairdressers and its trades mostly live on Facebook, where the regulars find them and the visitor never does. A visitor does not follow a pub in a town they arrived in this afternoon. They search, or they ask ChatGPT, and both answer from websites, listings and reviews. A simple page with the hours, the session nights, the rooms or the services, a map and a number is enough to be in the answer. Whether Instagram or Facebook is enough on its own goes through the gap.
The villages either side of the N71
Clonakilty is also the market town for a stretch of coast and country. Rosscarbery, Timoleague, Courtmacsherry, Ring and Ardfield shop here, and the trades based in the town work out to all of them. A plumber or an electrician from Clonakilty should name those places on the site, because a search from Rosscarbery finds the page that says Rosscarbery, and should set the Google listing as a service area business.
Plans
Everything happens over a video call, WhatsApp and email. Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month with bookings, payments, review requests, chat and the monthly Google work. The pricing page has the detail, and the bakeries page shows what we build for a food business.