The NSS Mystery Surfer trawls the internet to find the latest website developments by companies in the stone industry. This month he stopped at www.coulonstone.co.uk.

The world and his dog seems to be up-dating, redesigning, redeveloping or relaunching its websites – certainly in the stone industry, anyway.
Everyone’s at it, which I guess indicates what an important part of the marketing mix a website has become – or possibly that everyone has got a bit of spare time on their hands.
Certainly a growing number of customers expect to be able to buy from the internet, but even a lot of those who do not actually want to place an order by computer expect to be able to find suppliers of whatever they are looking for by Google-ing, or Bing-ing, or Yahoo-ing, or whatever is their preference.
When they are doing that, the website is often providing that all-important first impression about a company – an impression, whether it comes from the web or anywhere else, that will stick with people for a long time, even in the face of some evidence to the contrary.
Even customers who have already found the supplier they think they want seem to like to check out that company’s website as some kind of reassurance and a reinforcement of legitimacy.
So it is worth getting it right, as a growing number of those in the stone industry seem to be appreciating, even though almost everyone says only a small proportion of enquiries, let alone sales, come directly from the website.
The first generation – even, in a few cases, the second generation – of websites have served their purpose. Disdain of the internet has left the boardroom. Websites are no longer the domain of the techie nerd. The content and the design are Director level decisions, which is great news for domain designers because directors find it much easier to justify their own expenditure than they do someone else’s.
Some of the results are looking pretty impressive as they go live – although a surprising number seem to have had a launch date that has preceded the completion of the development of the site.
But perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. Website development seems even more likely to take longer and cost more than the original estimate even than construction work. It is also likely to involve even more snagging, as certain elements perform in peculiar and unexpected ways.
Certainly a lot of the latest generation of websites seem to have areas ‘under development’ or, as in the case of the online store at coulonstone.co.uk when I visited it this month, ‘down for maintenance’.
It is unfair to pick out the site of Coulon Stone in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, really, because the missing content is typical of so many and the site overall is better than a lot of others.
I particularly liked the element of interaction in the ‘Configurator’, which allows you to put in different stone and quartz worktops and floors… although not wall tiles. You can change the colour of the walls but you cannot add stone tiles or splashbacks.
There is only one kitchen layout, but it might help people decide a colour palette. It is easy to imagine families having fun with it as they plan their new kitchen – and ‘fun’ is not a bad adjective to be associated with a website.
Another element of successful web design and content is search engine optimisation, which most of the latest generation of websites seem to have got a handle on. Companies have probably started to understand its importance when their web designers mention it, even of they don’t understand quite what it involves. And it certainly is not easy keeping up with the search engine algorithms.
Last year Google made around 500 changes to its algorithm, including some major changes in a project called Panda intended to stop those irritating rip-off sites with poor, stolen or duplicate content (content farms) getting to the top of the search results. Panda was rolled out from February to November.
One of the most recent algorithm changes gave even more weight to news and updates, so the more frequently a website is updated, the higher up the search results it comes.
Coulon’s site has a news section with up-to-date entries. And the link to the news is there on the home page.
A lot of websites have news sections on them with entries that stopped a few months after the first one was entered. Still, if websites remain on the boardroom’s radar and are not relegated back to the boiler room when work picks up again perhaps the new generation of websites will be different.