Galway runs on a calendar. Shop Street, High Street and Quay Street are full of visitors from Easter to October, the Arts Festival takes over July, Race week at Ballybrit fills every pub from Eyre Square to the Spanish Arch, the students come back to the University and ATU in September, the Christmas market goes up in Eyre Square in November, and then February arrives and the city belongs to the people who live in it. Website design in Galway city has to serve a business through all of that: the visitor with a phone in the Latin Quarter, the student in Newcastle looking for a barber, the family in Knocknacarra or Doughiska looking for a dentist. We are Dublin based. The first chat with a Galway business is a video or phone call, the details and photos come over WhatsApp, and we build from them; we do not keep an office in Galway.
Two customers at once
A restaurant on Quay Street or a jeweller on Shop Street is found two ways. The visitor searches ‘restaurant Galway’, ‘Claddagh ring Galway’ or ‘live music Galway tonight’ from a hotel room or standing on the street, and increasingly asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI the same thing in a full sentence. The local searches more narrowly and more loyally, ‘barber Salthill’, ‘physio Knocknacarra’, ‘creche Doughiska’, and asks in the estate WhatsApp group first. A site has to answer both: Galway and H91 plainly in the title and the structured data for the visitor, the actual neighbourhood named for the local.
Reviews carry more weight here than in most places, because the visitor has nothing else to go on. A text after the meal or the haircut with the direct review link is how a good evening becomes the next booking, and our guide on how to get more Google reviews covers the link and the timing.
Shop Street, the West End and the suburbs
Galway’s independent trade is spread across three kinds of place. The pedestrian streets from Williamsgate down to the Spanish Arch, where the footfall is constant and the rents show it. The West End across the river, Dominick Street and Sea Road, where the restaurants, bars and small shops have a more local crowd. And the suburbs, Salthill and Knocknacarra to the west, Renmore, Mervue, Doughiska and Roscam to the east beside the med-tech plants in Parkmore, where a barber, a beautician or a takeaway serves the estates around it and rarely sees a tourist. Each needs the site to name its own place, because Galway alone puts a Knocknacarra salon in competition with the whole city.
Bookings and the quiet months
For a restaurant or a salon here the booking system is the point of the site. Complete includes bookings with deposits, which stop a Race-week no-show from costing a table, and we connect Fresha, Booksy or whatever you already use rather than replacing it. The quiet months are when the monthly Google work pays: a post about the winter menu, new photos, hours updated, so the February local finds you as readily as the July visitor. The guide on how to take online bookings sets out the options.
Living on Instagram
Galway’s tattoo studios, vintage shops, music teachers, grinds tutors in Newcastle and small food places in the West End often live on Instagram alone, and it suits the city’s style. It does not suit a search. The visitor who asks ChatGPT for a tattoo studio in Galway, or the parent typing ‘maths grinds Galway’ in September, is answered from websites, Google listings and reviews, not from a feed. Our guide on how to show up in ChatGPT answers explains what those tools read.
Two plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month with bookings, payments, chat, review requests and the monthly Google work. Both exclude VAT and neither has a contract. The detail is on the pricing page, and the restaurants page shows what we build for a kitchen.