The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so they say. I wouldn’t say Cerrig’s website is Hell – in fact, those parts of it that have been completed are very good – but it contains a fair number of paving stones to the surfer’s Hell of a website that promises more than it delivers.

There is no doubt this site is well laid out and it makes good use of moving pictures with a little bit of music. Whether it is intentional or not, the music that accompanies the videos, which start automatically on each new page, is not on a loop and ends before the video does, which is fine as far as I’m concerned. I’m not a fan of endlessly repeating clips of music that quickly become irritating, especially for those in the vicinity who are not actually using the computer. (The makers of children’s video games might like to take note!) The sound can be turned off on each clip without altering your computer settings, although you have to do it with each new page you open and even those first few bars grate after a few pages.

The Cerrig home page carries a simple, straight forward message. “Stone – the mark of sophistication.” It is accompanied by a gallery of stone projects that shows how stone can be used to produce sophisticated architecture. And at the bottom of the page – and, indeed, on every page – is the company’s address with telephone and fax numbers and an email address.

Contact details are all some people are looking for when they visit a website and although most people are by now familiar enough with the internet to look for the ‘contact’ button, it is still convenient not to have to. And it inspires confidence. A company that makes it easy for you to contact them rather than seeming to try to hide from customers makes you feel they must have no reason to hide.

When you enter the site, there is a six-and-a-half minute YouTube video that takes you on a tour of Cerrig’s factory to the accompaniment of muzak. It is not forced on you and it is up to you to start and end it. But as most people will not spend six-and-a-half minutes visiting a website in total, it could perhaps do with some editing.

The menu is at the bottom of the page and when you put your cursor over a menu box another line of third tier options available in that category appear in a line underneath, rather than on a drop-down menu. It is clear and obvious.

So far so good. Unfortunately this is where the good intentions begin. The site is well designed and the intention when it was designed was clearly to have a third tier of information to support the tier two categories that cover the goods and services of the company.

Unfortunately, someone lost interest or inspiration by tier three and a lot of the pages carry the message: “Information coming here soon...”.

Under ‘quotation’ a tier three option is ‘worktop quotation’. The page opens with the message: “We work to your individual requirements. However, to help you to estimate the cost of a 'typical' kitchen layout in a specific colour, why not use our online estimator?” Why not? Because there isn’t one.

My bête noir is news pages with out-of-date news. On the Cerrig site the latest entry is from May last year. It looks as if someone in the company needs to be given responsibility for up-dating this site.

My rating for this site, perhaps rather generously giving credit for the work carried out before it ran out of steam, is 78%.