A machinery mechanic in Tuam has a week that looks nothing like a Dublin one. Monday is in the yard. Tuesday the phone goes from Dunmore, a baler stopped with the weather turning. Wednesday is Headford and Milltown, Thursday a run out to Glenamaddy, Friday a service in Corofin and whoever stops you in the Square. Tuam is the market town of north Galway, with Shop Street and High Street running off the Square under the two cathedrals, and its trade is the trade of the farms around it: cattle, sheep, silage, machinery, feed, fencing, vets. Website design in Tuam is for that trade as much as for the barbers and pubs on the street. We are in Dublin and we work with Tuam businesses the way we work with everyone outside the capital: a video or phone call to start, WhatsApp after, the site built from what you send us.
The town the motorway passes
The M17 opened in 2017 and took the through traffic off the old N17 that the Saw Doctors sang about. It made Galway city a short drive, and that cuts both ways: Tuam’s shoppers can be in the city’s retail parks quickly, and the city’s trades can be in Tuam just as quickly. A Tuam business competes with Galway on Google whether it wants to or not. The honest answer is to be the local option, plainly: Tuam in the page title, H54 on the address, the villages you serve named one by one, and photos taken here rather than stock.
The sugar factory closed in the 1980s and the town rebuilt its working life around the farms, the Valeo plant and the trades. There is no passenger train, so everything moves by van and car, and a trade’s service area is however far the van goes in a morning.
Searching from the field
Farmers search differently from townspeople. The search is for a thing that has broken, ‘tyre Tuam’, ‘agri mechanic north Galway’, ‘vet Tuam emergency’, made on a phone in a field with one bar of signal. The page that loads fast, shows a mobile number that can be tapped and says we come out wins. A heavy site that takes ten seconds on 4G has lost before it appears. Everything we build is light and mobile first for that reason, and the Google Business Profile is set up as a service-area business for anyone who goes to the customer rather than the other way round. The steps are in our guide on getting your business on Google Maps.
Recommendations still travel at the mart, in the co-op and in the parish WhatsApp, but the name that is recommended gets searched before it gets rung, and if it does not appear the next name does.
The Square and the shops
On the street itself, Tuam’s butchers, hardware shops, pubs, barbers and pharmacies serve the town and the villages that come in to it: Corofin, Belclare, Kilconly, Abbeyknockmoy, Ballyglunin, Caherlistrane, Cummer. A shop’s page needs its hours, what it sells, where to park and a listing with the right pin. For a pub, the music nights and the food hours on a page you can change yourself from your phone are worth more than any amount of design.
Starting from Dublin
Ten minutes on a call in the evening is enough for us to begin, and the first draft follows within days. If you have never owned a domain, our guide on how to register a .ie domain explains what the registry asks for and why the domain should be in your own name rather than ours.
Price
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month, excluding VAT, no contract. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, chat and monthly Google work. The pricing page has the full comparison, and the agri machinery repairs page shows the trade version.