Dublin 8 runs from the canal at Portobello to the railway works at Inchicore, and in between it holds some of the oldest streets in the city and some of its newest hotels. Thomas Street, Meath Street and Francis Street in the Liberties, the South Circular Road through Rialto and Dolphin’s Barn, Clanbrassil Street and the canal bank in Portobello, Kilmainham with the Gaol and St James’s Hospital, Emmet Road in Inchicore. Website design in Dublin 8 has to work for a district where a tourist, a nurse and a family that has lived on the same street for three generations walk into the same shop. The first meeting is at your counter, not in our office; we are based in Dublin and the Liberties is a short walk from town.
Three kinds of customer
The tourists come for the Guinness Storehouse at St James’s Gate, the distilleries that have opened around Newmarket and James’s Street since 2015, Kilmainham Gaol, IMMA at the Royal Hospital and the two cathedrals. They search ‘coffee near Guinness Storehouse’ and ‘lunch Kilmainham’ standing on the footpath, and they read reviews. The hospital crowd, staff and visitors at St James’s and the Coombe, search for food, a pharmacy, a barber and a taxi at odd hours. The residents are the old Liberties families, the students in the new blocks around Thomas Street and Newmarket, the young renters of Portobello and Rialto, and the long settled streets of Inchicore. They ask the local Facebook groups first and Google second.
Market streets and workshops
Meath Street is still a shopping street in the old sense: butchers, fruit and veg, bargain shops, cafes, a church in the middle. Francis Street is antiques, galleries and the restorers and upholsterers who work with them. Thomas Street has NCAD, the Digital Hub, the old pubs and the new coffee. Portobello and Clanbrassil Street have the cafes and bars for the renters. Inchicore and Rialto have the barbers, nail salons, takeaways and small trades for the people who live there. A carpenter or a plumber based in Inchicore works the whole district and out into Kilmainham, Drimnagh and Ballyfermot.
Searching across a long district
Because Dublin 8 is so stretched, people search by the named place, not the number: ‘barber Portobello’, ‘butcher Meath Street’, ‘cafe Inchicore’, ‘physio Kilmainham’. The number comes in for trades and for people new to Dublin: ‘plumber Dublin 8’, ‘nail salon Dublin 8’. AI tools are now in the mix as well, and a visitor asking ChatGPT where to eat near Kilmainham Gaol gets an answer read from the pages and the Google listings that state their facts plainly. The guide on what AI search means for a local business goes through what those tools need.
What a D08 page carries
The named place first, then Dublin 8 and the D08 routing key in the structured data and on the Google Business Profile. The nearest Luas stop on the red line (James’s, Fatima, Rialto, Suir Road, Goldenbridge) or the bus route along Thomas Street and the South Circular. Hours that hold on a bank holiday weekend when the Storehouse is at its busiest. For food, the menu as text. For antiques and workshops, a gallery updated from your phone. For anything bookable, a deposit, because a no-show on a Saturday costs real money in a district this busy; the guide to taking deposits online covers how to do it fairly.
Old shops without a page, and price
Many of the longest established businesses in the Liberties and Inchicore have never had a website, and many of the newest in Portobello have only an Instagram. Both are missing from the search the tourist and the new neighbour make. A single clear page with photos of the real shop fixes that for either. The village pages for the Liberties, Portobello, Kilmainham and Inchicore go deeper on each. The two plans are Essentials (€499 to set up, €50 a month) and Complete (€1,499 to set up, €100 a month, with bookings, payments, deposits and the monthly Google work). See the pricing page, and the trade pages under businesses we build for, such as antique dealers and tour guides.