Website rebuild
IrishDriven
A full rebuild for a Dublin private chauffeur service: new copy, design and build, with trip planning on the first screen and the old site's addresses kept working.
The business
IrishDriven is a private chauffeur service based in Dublin. Its chauffeurs meet guests at Dublin Airport, drive them from city to city, and take them on day tours and longer trips around Ireland, in Mercedes-Benz E-Class and S-Class cars and a seven-seat Business MPV.
The challenge
The old website ran on a server the business wanted to close. It opened on a photo of a van parked in a side street, and most sections were a heading with a line or two of text, so the pages said little about what travelling with IrishDriven is like.
Search was a second problem. The old site answered on two addresses, with and without www, and with any query string attached, and had no canonical tags, so Google had indexed several copies of the same pages. Most of its search traffic came from a single journal post, which couldn't be lost in the move.
The direction
Keep what the business is already known by, the gold crest logo and the line “Ireland, Your Way”, and build everything else around Ireland itself: the places guests are travelling to, and the people who drive them there.
Structure
The home page opens with a trip planner over the Cliffs of Moher. Guests choose one way, by the hour or a tour, then add the pickup, destination, date and time, and the address fields search real places on the island of Ireland.
From there the site splits by what guests need: services such as airport transfers, city to city and day tours, a set of tours, the fleet, business travel, an about page and a journal. Dublin Airport has its own page, which sets out what happens on arrival: the flight is tracked, the chauffeur waits in the arrivals hall at Terminal 1 or 2 with a name board, and the first 60 minutes of waiting are free.
Messaging
I rewrote all of the copy in a warmer, more personal voice, opening with “Céad míle fáilte.” Before writing, I looked at what people search for. Visitors from the US tend to look for a “private driver” or “private tours” as well as a chauffeur, so the pages use all three.
Every claim on the site is one the business confirmed, from the free waiting time at the airport to its licensed chauffeurs.
Design
The client kept their logo, a gold crest made for a black background. So the logo always sits on black: the header, the footer, the reviews band and the planner panels are black, and the rest of the site is a warm ivory, with gold taken from the logo. A fully black version came first and was set aside as too dark to read comfortably.
Large photographs of Ireland carry the pages, all with the same colour grade, and a map of the island traces the routes the chauffeurs drive.
Development
The site is built with Astro and hosted on Cloudflare, in the client's own account. The address search uses Google Places through a server route, so the key never reaches the browser. Enquiries go straight to the booking inbox by email, and the guest gets a copy. The Google Ads tag only loads after a visitor accepts cookies.
Moving to a new site without losing search traffic took the most care. The new pages keep the old address format, the journal post that brought in most of the old site's traffic stayed at the same address, and the old addresses that changed now redirect to their new pages. Canonical tags point Google at one copy of each page.
The result
The new site went live on irishdriven.com on 5 October 2026. All 37 addresses found in a crawl of the old site either load or redirect, so links from Google and elsewhere keep working. Guests can plan a trip from the first screen, and every enquiry reaches the booking inbox with a copy to the guest.
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