Listowel has two weeks that the whole country notices, Writers’ Week around the June bank holiday and the races in September, and fifty others when it is a north Kerry market town doing what it has always done. The Square is the centre, with the churches, the writers’ museum and the castle behind it on the bank of the Feale, and Church Street, William Street and Market Street running off it with the shops, the pubs and the offices. The farms around the town are dairy country, the plant on the edge of town grew out of the co-op those farmers founded, and the N69 carries the traffic between Tralee and Limerick past the door.
Website design in Listowel has to earn its keep in the fifty ordinary weeks, with the two famous ones as a bonus. We are based in Dublin and we work with Listowel businesses remotely: a video call first, your photos and details sent on WhatsApp, the site built from what you send. We have no office in the town and we are not going to suggest otherwise.
The ordinary week
On a weekday the people searching in Listowel are the people who live within twenty miles of it. A farmer outside Lixnaw looking for a vet or a machinery repair, a family in Ballybunion looking for a dentist, somebody in a new estate on the Tralee road looking for a plumber at eight in the evening. They type the town name with the trade, “solicitor Listowel”, “hairdresser Listowel”, “electrician Listowel”, and Google uses the distance from their V31 address and the quality of the listing to decide who they see.
For a business in the town that means being correct on Google first, with the hours and the real photos, and having a page that says plainly what you do, what it costs where you can say it, and which villages you cover: Lixnaw, Ballyduff, Ballybunion, Tarbert, Moyvane, Duagh, Abbeyfeale over the Limerick line. Google is good with a service area described in plain words and bad with a boast about all of Munster.
The two famous weeks
Writers’ Week and the races bring a crowd that has never been to the town and that books accommodation, tables and taxis in advance from Dublin, Cork and abroad. For the pubs, restaurants, B&Bs, cafes and the shops on the Square, those weeks reward a page that already exists and already answers the obvious questions: are you open late, do you take bookings, is there a room. A line on the home page about race week hours, put up the week before and taken down the week after, is a two minute job from your own phone.
Farms, contractors and the co-op country
The trades that serve north Kerry’s farms, agricultural contractors, machinery repairs, vets, fencing, well drilling, fuel and firewood suppliers, are mostly found by word of mouth, and that still works for the farmer whose father used the same man. It fails for the next generation and for the newcomer. A simple page, what you do, where you go, photos of actual work, a number that rings, puts you in the search the new customer makes. We have written about getting a business onto Google Maps, which is where most of these searches end.
Bookshops, bakeries and the Square’s independents
A town that calls itself a literary town ought to have its bookshops, its cafes and its bakeries findable, and many of them live on Facebook alone. Facebook reaches the regulars. It does not reach the visitor searching “Listowel bookshop” in May or the new family searching “Listowel bakery” in November. A proper page gives both of them an answer and gives the AI tools something to read when someone asks them where to eat in Listowel.
Plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month and suits most of the trades and shops in the town. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, chat and the monthly Google work. The pricing page has the detail, and the agricultural contractors page is the place to start for a farm trade.