Web design agency in Ireland

A .ie domain has a qualification step

Anyone can register a .com in a couple of minutes. A .ie is different: you have to show a genuine connection to Ireland through the IE Domain Registry before it is granted. Since the rules were eased in 2018 you no longer have to justify your claim to the particular name you want, but the connection requirement is still there, so allow for a short verification step rather than expecting it instantly. Plenty of Irish businesses hold both and point one at the other.

Cookie banners here are stricter than most sites assume

The banner most sites copy was written for the American market, where telling people about cookies is often enough. Here it is not. Consent has to be gathered before anything non-essential loads, which means analytics and advertising scripts must be genuinely blocked until somebody agrees rather than fired on page load and switched off afterwards.

Two things follow from that. Refusing has to be as easy as accepting, so a banner with a large Accept button and a buried opt-out is not doing its job. And your visitor numbers will be lower than you expect, because you are only measuring the people who said yes. That is the correct number, not a broken one.

We are not solicitors and this is a general explanation rather than legal advice, but it is the part of an Irish website most often got wrong by accident.

Eircodes and phone numbers

Irish addresses use an Eircode: seven characters, no relationship to the county, and no useful pattern to validate against. Address forms lifted from a UK or American template routinely reject perfectly valid ones, or demand a state, or insist on a postcode format that does not exist here.

Phone numbers have a similar trap. Show the number the way a customer would read it aloud, but write it in the link and the structured data in international form, starting +353. That is what lets a phone dial it with one tap and what lets Google match the number to your business listing.