If you Google ‘natural stone’, top of the list of the entries that have not been paid for is Realstone, as befits their position as one of the biggest UK companies in the market. Their sister company, Block Stone, extract the stone from their UK quarries while Realstone supply masonry, both in their indigenous stones and imported stones. In Scotland they also fix.

According to techie friends of mine, the first page of results on a search engine gets 70-90% of all the click throughs and the one at the top gets way more than the others.

As Realstone are such prominent players in the stone market, this month I decided to visit their website. I was prepared to be impressed, anticipating some innovative approaches to web-marketing. Frankly, I was disappointed.

To be at the top of the Google list they must be getting a reasonable number of visitors, but the site does not quite reflect their position in the industry, which, in turn, does not reflect that well on the industry itself.

I have often said it is better not to have a news section on a website than to have a news section with practically nothing on it or material that is out-of-date. The latest entry on the Realstone website is at least up-to-date. It says they are sponsoring the James Wong and David Cubero show garden at Chelsea Flower Show again this year and more information will follow. In fact, it says it twice on two identical entries. The latest entry before that is from a year ago. It announces that the James Wong and David Cubero garden at Chelsea that Realstone were involved with won a Silver Medal.

There are 10 news entries altogether. One is from 2008, announcing the launch of this website. The announcement was not large enough or clear enough for me to be able to read on the website, but you can click to print it. If you can read the small, blurred print-out you will find it says (as best as I could decipher): “After consulting clients and specifiers we have designed a website that is at the leading edge of the natural stone industry…” Er, well…

Another section, under a heading of Proud to be Green, says: “The latest edition of the Green Guide, due to be published in January ’08 by BRE, with whom we are also working closely…” The fact that the entry is so out of date makes you question not only Realstone’s commitment to environmental issues but the industry’s as a whole.

There are case studies of projects using stone supplied by Realstone but, apart from the first one that seems to date from 2000, details of the cases in question are limited to just a few lines of text and some pictures. Not much of a study.

A novel element is a client portfolio section, where clients register to create their own, password protected area where they can post their project details.

Presumably most people visit the site to find out about the stones Realstone offer. This information is useful and includes test results that should be helpful when specifying. And the site looks good. But companies need to be honest with themselves when they create websites about how much time and effort they are prepared to devote to maintaining them and have them designed accordingly.

It is better to have a website than not have one. According to Business Know-How, an American website for small businesses reaching about 3million of them each year, seventh of the top 10 reasons start up companies crash is because they don’t have a website. But a website is a marketing tool and has to convey the right message.

Perhaps my expectations of Realstone’s website were too high because of the status of the company in the stone industry, but my rating for it is: 78%.