The Mystery Surfer : Helical help
Spiral Construction are not a stone company, they are a company who sell helical (and some other) staircases, some of which come from Wachenfeld Natursteinwerk, who make spiral staircases with natural stone treads.
These are not the almost mystical cantilevered stone staircases that are the province of stonemasons, they are steel structures that happen to have stone steps. On other parts of this website there are steel staircases that happen to have glass, timber or concrete steps.
This is not a website to visit to find out about stone, as such, but it is a website you might like to visit if you want a helical staircase that incorporates stone – or if you want to see a good example of a clean, focused website that might give you some ideas for your own site.
There are plenty of pictures on the site – although some are irritatingly small and do not enlarge when you click on them – but information is not excessive. Instead most pages have downloadable PDF information sheets. Some people do not like having to download PDFs in order to see the information, but I think it can be quite an effective way of making a lot of information available about specific products or techniques without cluttering the website. The PDFs need to be well designed, of course, and have all the contact details necessary so that you can be contacted from them, but once they are downloaded the potential customer has your material readily available to them, and anyone else they want to show them to, without having to search for your website again.
And the PDFs from Spiral Construction are useful and do contain technical and design information for architects, developers and contractors.
And they contain contact information, which might be helpful to Spiral because when I Googled ‘spiral staircases’ they did not appear on either of the first two pages. On the other hand, type in ‘spiral construction’ and they are top of the list.
And once you are on their website there is plenty of contact information. Some websites give you the distinct impression that the company finds life a lot better without being bothered by customers. Not this one. And there are links through to the company’s entries on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which is really making the most of the web.
The site is conveniently divided into product categories, and features applications such as residential, commercial, interior and exterior, public and private sectors as case studies.
There is a news section, which probably seems like a good idea when companies first get their websites but can quickly become a rod for their own backs, because unless it is kept up-to-date it can quickly make the whole site appear unattended. Spiral Construction’s is a bit odd and lets down what is otherwise a useful site.
Overall rating: 82%