Killiney has almost no shops and a great many houses. The hill with the obelisk on top, the bay below it, the DART station standing right on the beach, the roads climbing from Vico Road between gates and high walls: it is a place people live in and come to walk in, not a place they shop in. The shopping centre is over on the Ballybrack side, and most other errands go to Dalkey or Dun Laoghaire. So website design in Killiney is mostly for the people who keep those houses standing: landscapers, tree surgeons, painters, electricians, window cleaners, alarm fitters, cleaners, and the designers and architects who plan the extensions.
We are Dublin based and we meet owners wherever the work is, which in Killiney usually means a driveway.
How a Killiney homeowner picks a trade
The houses here are large and old enough to need constant attention, and the people in them are used to paying for things done properly. They choose a trade the way they choose a solicitor: by asking someone they trust, then checking. The asking happens at the school gate, on the hill walk at eight in the morning, in the residents’ WhatsApp group. The checking happens on a phone that evening, and what they want to see is photographs of comparable work, a sense of who will turn up, reviews from people like them, and a way to get in touch that is not a form that goes nowhere.
The urgent searches are different: “electrician Killiney” from a house with half the lights out, “tree surgeon near me” after a storm off the bay has put a branch across the drive, “locksmith A96” at eleven at night. For those, the map result with the right area, the phone number and the hours wins before anyone reads a word.
Service area, not shopfront
Almost nobody serving Killiney has premises there. They have a van, a base in Shankill or Ballybrack or Sallynoggin or Bray, and a client list that runs from Dalkey to Greystones. The right way to present that is a Google Business Profile set up as a service-area business with Killiney, Dalkey, Shankill, Cabinteely and the rest listed, and a site that says the same thing in a sentence a person would say. Getting your business on Google Maps covers the service-area setting and the pin.
The Eircodes here start with A96, the same as Dalkey and Dun Laoghaire, and some customers will search by the code. Say it once. Then spend the words on what the homeowner needs to decide: what you do, roughly what it costs, how soon you can come, who you are. What a small business website should include is the checklist we work from.
The ones with no page at all
Killiney has dog walkers who meet their clients on the hill, cleaners who have done the same houses for a decade, gardeners who only ever get work when a neighbour leans over a wall. None of them has a page, and most do not think they need one until a client moves away and the next one, searching rather than asking, cannot find them. A one-page site with the service, the area, the price and a WhatsApp button is enough, and it is where the next client will look.
Cost
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month and suits a trade with a phone and a van. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments with deposits, review requests after each job and live chat. The pricing page has the full list, and the landscapers page shows how a garden trade presents its work.