This month the editor has asked me to look at the Stone Roofing Association’s website that has been created by Terry Hughes, the fount of all knowledge when it comes to putting stone slates on your roof.

Visiting the site takes me back to 1997 when I first encountered the internet. It had already been in the public domain by then for a decade or so and some websites were just beginning to become something like those we know today, although most were the work of computer geeks and academics. There were only a few million sites on the net in those days and most of them were, shall we say, works in progress.

A fair bit of what was on the net in those early days was pretty learned stuff. Yes, kids were talking inanely to each other in chat rooms – Facebook and Twitter not yet having taken up the mantle of cyber-blabber – but much of the early mainstream internet involved the intelligentsia using the speed (even in those days of dial-up) of the superhighway to disseminate and develop ideas, which was more important to them than the look of the websites on which the ideas appeared.

The Stone Roofing Association’s website is like that. It is not going to win any awards for design but it contains a serious amount of detailed information about stone and how to use it on roofs, some of it of practical use, much of it of academic interest. It would be a good site to visit for a student of conservation looking for source material for a dissertation.

Does it matter that the site looks academic? That it lacks whistles and bows?

Maybe. People are used to information being presented to them in increasingly digestible ways. Anything that looks as if it might exercise brains or stretch attention spans might be summarily dismissed or lost in a blur of sensory overload. In any case, why shouldn’t interesting information be presented in interesting ways?

Some of the material on the Stone Roofing Association website is well presented… when you get to it – navigation of the site is not as straight forward as we have come to expect.

But the way other information is presented can be quite daunting when you first look at it. ‘The stratigraphy of the tilestones and their locations’, for example. To be fair, it doesn’t take that long to work it out, but when the page opens the initial appearance makes you reel.

I’m not sure how relevant search engine optimisation is to a site like this because there is no reason to want to attract the casual surfer looking for roofing tiles. Most people will be after concrete products and are not going to be persuaded to switch to stone by serendipitously coming across the website of the Stone Roofing Association. You have to want information on stone roofs to be looking for it and if you Google ‘stone roofing’ the Stone Roofing Association appears at the top of the unpaid-for list. It is still on the first page if you search for ‘sandstone roofing’, although put in ‘limestone roofing’ or ‘stone roofing tiles’ and commercial contractors and merchants take over.

The Stone Roofing Association site sets out to be the authority on stone roofing and it certainly contains a lot of information and links to even more information. For that I give it 91%. But the site is reminiscent of an era of internet development that is over. Information is not well sign-posted and some of it is difficult to view. My overall score is 66%.