On an All-Ireland Sunday, Drumcondra Road is a river of jerseys from the Tolka bridge down to Croke Park, and every cafe, pub and chipper on it is full before throw-in. On the Tuesday after, the same road is students walking up to the DCU St Patrick’s campus, people coming off the train at Drumcondra station, and residents of the roads either side of the Tolka going about their business. A business here lives in both of those Drumcondras. Website design in Drumcondra has to help with the ordinary Tuesday and still be ready for the Sunday. We are based in Dublin and we meet owners here in person, on the premises.
Who searches, and from where
Four groups search for Drumcondra businesses and they want different things. Match-goers search “pub near Croke Park” and “parking Drumcondra” from a car or a train on the morning of the game, and they want hours, whether you are taking bookings, and a map. Students search for the barber, the physio, the takeaway and the pharmacy in September and keep searching all year, because they do not know the area. Guests in the guesthouses along Drumcondra Road search for breakfast, a taxi and a chemist from a bedroom the night before. And the residents, many of them here for decades, search less often but with higher stakes: a dentist, a physio, grinds for the Leaving Cert, a plumber on a Sunday night.
Only the residents hear recommendations by word of mouth. Everyone else goes straight to Google Maps.
Hours, the guesthouse problem, and the airport road
Drumcondra Road is also the old road to the airport, which is why it has so many guesthouses and B&Bs. Their problem is that the big booking platforms own the customer and take a slice of every night. A site of your own that shows availability, takes a deposit into your account and answers the questions a guest asks (how far to Croke Park, which bus goes to the airport, is there parking) wins a share of those bookings back. We cover the options in how to take online bookings.
For everyone else the basics are the same, but the details are Drumcondra’s. State the D09 routing key and the street. Say you are beside the station or across from the campus. Set match-day hours as special hours on Google so the Sunday crowd sees them. Keep the menu as text so Google and the AI search tools can read it, and change it yourself from the phone when the price of a roll goes up.
Instagram-only on Drumcondra Road
The newer coffee places, the home bakers who supply them, the barbers renting a chair and the personal trainers who use Griffith Park mostly run on Instagram. The account is good for the regulars. It is invisible to the student who searched “barber Drumcondra” or the match-goer who searched “coffee near Croke Park”, because those searches are answered by Google Maps and by websites, not by Instagram. A page alongside the account, with a booking button for the appointment trades, fixes that. Reviews count for a lot here too, and the guide on getting more Google reviews explains the honest way to ask.
Two plans
There are two plans. Essentials: €499 to set up, €50 a month, covering the site, hosting, the Google listing and WhatsApp changes. Complete: €1,499 and €100 a month, with bookings, payments, review requests and chat on top. The pricing page has everything in one place, and the B&Bs and guesthouses page shows what we build for the Drumcondra Road trade.