Nobody gives directions in Glenageary by naming a shop. They say “past the roundabout”, “down from the station”, “the Sallynoggin side” or “the Dalkey side”. The place is roads of houses between Dun Laoghaire and Dalkey, with the DART station at one edge, the roundabout in the middle, and a few local shops, clinics and schools rather than a main street. Website design in Glenageary is therefore not about a shopfront. It is about the trades, tutors, childminders and therapists who work from these houses and from the vans parked outside them.
We are based in Dublin and we come to Glenageary to meet, at the kitchen table more often than at a counter.
The 8pm search
Glenageary searches happen at home. A boiler goes at seven on a January evening and someone types “plumber Glenageary” or “emergency plumber A96” into a phone while standing in a cold kitchen. A parent realises in late August that the Leaving Cert student needs maths grinds and searches from the sofa. A new arrival on one of the roads wants a dog groomer, a childminder and a physio, and has nobody to ask yet.
The other route is the local groups: the road’s WhatsApp, the parents’ group at the school, the community Facebook pages where “can anyone recommend an electrician” gets twenty replies. Every name in those replies gets searched. The ones that show a real page with photos of real jobs and a number that works get the call; the ones that show nothing get the benefit of the doubt only if someone’s cousin vouched for them.
Naming the place correctly
Glenageary’s Eircodes begin with A96, the same as Dun Laoghaire, Dalkey, Killiney and Sallynoggin, and most of your customers live in one of those. So the honest way to write the site is to say Glenageary once, clearly, as where you are, and then to say the surrounding places as where you work: Dun Laoghaire, Sallynoggin, Dalkey, Killiney, Glasthule, Sandycove. Written as a sentence, the way you would say it on the phone.
The Google Business Profile does the rest. For a trade or a tutor working from home it should be set up as a service-area business, which hides the house number and shows the area instead. Getting your business on Google Maps walks through it, including the mistakes that stop a listing appearing at all, like a pin in the wrong place or a second old listing nobody remembers making. Setting up the profile in Ireland covers the verification step, which is where most people get stuck.
Working from the kitchen table
The businesses that most need a page here are the ones least likely to have one: the mobile hairdresser who does the older residents on the Sallynoggin side, the pet groomer in a converted garage, the childminder with a waiting list she keeps in her head, the piano teacher, the gardener who has done the same dozen gardens for years. They run on reputation and a mobile number, and reputation is not searchable.
A plain site fixes that without changing how they work. The price list, the area covered, three or four photos, a WhatsApp button and an enquiry form that lands in the same phone they already answer. For a one-person business Essentials is normally plenty.
What you pay
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, review requests and live chat, which a tutor or a groomer with a full diary tends to want. The pricing page has the detail, and the plumbers page shows how a service-area trade is set up.