Ratoath lives on two calendars. One is the racing one: Fairyhouse at the edge of the village, with the Irish Grand National at Easter, the winter and spring meetings, and the Tattersalls sales complex beside the course bringing buyers from everywhere. The other is the school one, because Ratoath filled with young families over the last twenty-five years and the week runs on creche hours, school runs, the GAA pitches and the Venue theatre. Main Street holds the pubs, the shops, the salons and the clinics between the two, with Ashbourne a few minutes one way and Dunshaughlin the other.
Website design in Ratoath has to work for a farrier whose customers are yards and for a creche whose customers are parents who arrived last year, and often for a business that serves both. We are in Dublin, so the first chat with a Ratoath business is a phone or video call; everything after that works the same way it does for anyone we meet in person.
Race days and the ordinary days
On a race day the searches are from strangers: where to eat before the first race, a taxi back to Dublin or Dunboyne station, a pub showing the racing afterwards, a B&B for a trainer’s staff. Those people have never been to Ratoath and will decide on the phone. On the ordinary days the searches are from the estates: “creche Ratoath”, “landscaper Ratoath”, “dog trainer Meath”, “caterer for communion Ratoath”, “cake maker Ratoath”, and they are made at night, after the children are down, by people who moved here recently and do not yet have a name for any of those things.
Both sets of searches reward the same thing: a business that is correct on Google, has photos of real work and can be booked without a phone call during the working day.
Yards, farriers and the equestrian trade
Fairyhouse and Tattersalls sit in a landscape of yards, livery, studs and riding schools that stretches across Ratoath, Dunshaughlin, Kilbride and towards Ashbourne. The farriers, equine vets, feed merchants, horsebox repairs, fencing contractors and riding instructors who serve them have mostly never needed a website; the trade knew them. New owners and yard staff arrive every year who do not, and they search for a farrier the way anyone else searches for a dentist. A page that names the trade, the yards and areas covered and a mobile number, with a service-area Google listing that does not need an address, is the whole job for most of them.
The A85 page and the places around
Ratoath’s Eircode is A85, which it shares with the villages around it, so the page needs the village name written plainly and a street address or a map pin for anything on Main Street. For a trade or a mobile business the service area is wider than the village: Ashbourne, Dunshaughlin, Dunboyne, Kilbride, and across into Swords and Finglas for a lot of them. We write those places into the page in sentences and set the Google Business Profile to match. Our checklist of what a small business website should include covers the rest of what goes on the page.
Caterers, cake makers and the Friday cancellation
Ratoath’s caterers, cake makers, party entertainers, bouncy castle hire and home-based beauty rooms live on Instagram and WhatsApp. The photos are the right place for the work; the booking is the problem, because an order agreed in a message with no deposit is the one that is cancelled on the Friday. A site with an order form that takes a deposit by card settles that, and the guide on taking deposits online in Ireland explains how to word the terms fairly.
What it costs
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings with deposits, payments, review requests, chat and the monthly Google work. Everything is on the pricing page, and the equestrian centres page shows what a yard’s site includes.