In what they herald as a drive to increase both the specification of their stone and roofing slate and the selection of it by householders, Cumbrian stone producers Burlington have launched a new website.

That householders as well as specifiers are becoming much more familiar with stone is recognised on the new website in a new area called In Your Home. Householders are also increasingly used to buying products on-line, but they cannot do that on this website.

In fact, it is a little bit difficult to determine from this website how you can buy the stone. There are contact numbers for both the UK and USA, and a call-back request that produces a form to fill in requesting a call from Burlington, which is clear enough and would, no doubt, result in a householder being told how to go about buying the stone. But there are no links to stockists nor (heaven forfend) any mention of prices.

There is a Links page, but its only link, so far at least, is to Holker Estates, Lord Cavendish’s company that owns Burlington Slate.

Go to the Support page and you get a message: “Our team of dedicated support technicians are here to help you in any question / problem you may have with our products. Before requesting a call back or emailing a question please check our faq.” Only I couldn’t find any frequently asked questions to check and the ‘team’ of dedicated support technicians seems to comprise Steve BrockBank (sic), whose smiling face and email address are the only entries under Support Team. Steve is going to be busy.

Technical Support takes you to pages from which you can download PDFs to give assistance. Sometimes what is on the PDF is also available on screen with a printer friendly version, which is helpful because even in these days of broadband it is ever so slightly irritating not to be able to see information on line and have to download it and wait for Acrobat to open it up.

And while I hate to be picky, even some of these PDFs are a little bit sloppy. Under the Underfloor Heating heading for downloads, for example, there is a section that says: “once the levelling screeds are cured and dried (refer 4.1.7 & 4.1.8)…”. But there is no 4.1.7 or 4.1.8 to refer to nor any indication of what it does refer to. Presumably there was on whatever the PDF was originally taken from.

At least that was better than the next category, Flooring General Specification. For me, that only produced the message: bad request. Cleaning and Maintenance Data Sheet did the same.

On the finishes and textures page there is a picture of all the finishes and textures mentioned except ‘grit blasted’. I won’t go on.

These are niggly little inconveniences, frustrations and peculiarities on a nice looking website that aspires to provide a lot of useful information but looks as if it has been launched before it was quite ready. These are the sort of things that make people think twice about the company supplying the information and don’t incline them to make a return visit to the site.

Rating: 71%.