Wexford town is built on two lines. Main Street, North and South, is a narrow lane of independent shops that runs the length of the old town, and the Quay runs parallel to it along the harbour, wide and open, with the bridge across to Ferrybank and the Opera House showing above the rooftops. Between them are the Bull Ring with its market days and its pikeman, Selskar Abbey at the north end, and the lanes that drop from one line to the other. It is a county town, with the hospital, the county council, the courts, the train station at Redmond Square and the retail parks out at Drinagh on the Rosslare road, but the centre has kept its small shops in a way few Irish towns have.
That matters for website design in Wexford town. The Main Street trade is boutiques, jewellers, shoe shops, opticians, hair and beauty, cafes, restaurants and pubs, most of them family-run and many of them with no website at all because the street itself was always their advertising. We are based in Dublin, so for a Wexford business the first chat is a video or phone call, and we build the site from the photos and details you send us on WhatsApp. The rest works as it does for anyone else: changes by message, a report each month.
The street is not enough any more
The customer walking Main Street on a Saturday still exists, but the one who matters more each year searches first. “Boutique Wexford”, “restaurant Wexford town”, “hair salon Wexford”, “dentist Wexford”, in Google, on a phone, from Castlebridge or Rosslare or a hotel room, and a list of three comes back with hours, photos and reviews. A shop that has traded on Main Street since the grandparents’ time but has no site and a half-filled Google listing is not on that list. A new shop with both is. The AI tools make this sharper, because they answer “where should I eat in Wexford” with whatever has its facts written down plainly online.
Instagram does a lot of work for Wexford’s boutiques and salons, and it should stay. What it cannot do is show up in a Google search, display opening hours, take a booking or be read by someone who does not use the app. We have written about whether Instagram is enough on its own.
The festival fortnight, and the other eleven months
Wexford Festival Opera fills the town for two weeks every autumn, and the restaurants, B&Bs and pubs take a year’s worth of bookings from people who have never been here before and search from abroad in English, German and French. Hours for the festival, a menu with prices, a booking button and a deposit for a table on the busy nights are what win that trade, and a site that can change its hours from a phone is what keeps it from going wrong. The rest of the year the trade is the county: Rosslare, Kilmore Quay, Castlebridge, Taghmon, Bridgetown and the villages, whose people treat Wexford town as theirs and search by its name.
Small facts, the Quay and the car
A Wexford site should tell people where to park, because the narrow streets and the one-way system are the first thing a visitor worries about; it should carry the Y35 routing key and an address identical to the one on the Google Business Profile; and it should show the hours including the Sunday and the bank holidays. For a restaurant or a salon it should also keep up with reviews, including the bad ones, and we have written on how to reply to bad Google reviews without making them worse.
Plans
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month, with the site, the .ie domain, the Google listing and a page you edit yourself. Complete is €1,499 and €100 a month and adds bookings, payments, chat, review requests and monthly Google work. The comparison is on the pricing page, and the clothes boutiques page shows what a shop site looks like.