There’s a marketing acronym that many of you will be familiar with: KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. It is a good guiding principle for most forms of communication. Spell it out, one idea at a time, in words and pictures.

It was with this in mind that the website of Cotswold Stone & Tile of Crucis Park Quarry in Gloucestershire was recommended to me.

It is simple and all the more powerful from a design point of view for that. It is clean and straight forward, using a limited palette of complementary colours in uncomplicated blocks. There is a design feature of a stylised dinosaur footprint that is on the company logo running through the pages (because the stone is from the Jurassic that tends to be most associated with dinosaurs).

Take a look at the site and you will see what can be achieved with some knowledge of HTML (used to create web pages), a reasonable quality digital camera and a clear idea of what you want to achieve.

The pictures are presented in a gallery. Click on any one of them and it is enlarged and can be used as the starting point of a slide show of all the pictures in the larger format.

The site does not quite make it into the first 10 on a Google search for ‘Cotswold stone’, but it is only 13th, which is extremely good for a young site. It was not so good when I searched for ‘stone roofing’. I passed dozens of imported stone and concrete products, as well as other British products, before finally giving up looking for Cotswold Stone & Tile.

Nevertheless, what this site does it does without fuss or delay.

And yet…

It is all very well to keep it simple and have a website that does little more than invite people to contact you for details of the products, but a population increasingly familiar with internet shopping tends to want more than that.

Certainly keep the top two tiers of the website clear and visually stimulating, but allow those who want more information to delve down to at least third tiers to get some test results and simply some knowledge of the product, if only for a comfort factor or not to sound stupid when they make contact.

Google does index tier three pages and they can play an important part in putting your website on the first page of results with a much wider range of search terms. And the more pages you have and the more frequently a site is up-dated, the more seriously the search engines will take it, all of which pushes it up the rankings.

Providing extra information can also create extra sales opportunities. For example, Cotswold Stone & Tile have pages about lime mortars, but the information is scant, to say the least.

Conservation architects and masons working in conservation do tend to have a better understanding of lime products these days than they did a few years ago, but even now it is not uncommon to meet people who don’t know their hydrated lime from their hydraulic lime.

Overall this is a site that has potential. It looks good but needs more content. Rating: 65%.