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.englishcitystone.co.uk.

I wasn’t looking for English City Stone but the site appeared more than once on the first page of my stone-related entries into Yahoo so I thought: Well, this company’s doing something right so let’s take a look at what it has to offer.

English City Stone is in London and has made a speciality of stone steps, but also does hard landscaping and other stone work. The home page shows one of the reasons the site appears on the first page of search results – Tweets.

The specific focus of the site (stone steps) does not bring it a huge numbers of visitors, but then most stone company websites do not get huge numbers of visitors. So presumably what’s moving it up the search engine listings is its search engine optimisation (SEO) and the Tweets. There were not many Tweets and nothing for a couple of weeks, but at least they were there and search engines love signs of social networking.

But one of the tweets, repeating a message on the opening of the home page, should act as a warning. It says the business has been having problems with its landline and gives an alternative mobile number.

The tweet was made on the same day as another tweet saying the new website had gone live and hoping people liked the new design.

When you have just put a phone number in the public arena and you immediately say you are having problems with it and to ring a mobile instead, it just looks a little bit odd.

On the other hand, the Tweets have a name on them and there is an address at the bottom of every page on the website, which does not look like the typical behaviour of someone who wants to remain anonymous. And the telephone number given, with or without its problems, is an ordinary landline number, not an anonymous (if free) 0800 number or one of the alternatives for which you are charged a premium rate.

Also proudly displayed on each page is the logo of the Guild of Master Craftsmen and the Guild’s website confirms that English City Stone is a member. So now I feel bad about having been so cynical just because of one little tweet about a problem with a phone line. But I only feel bad after half-an-hour checking out the company.

The rest of the site does convey a good impression. It has a clean simple design with a simple but attractive English City Stone logo – three irregular oval shapes piled liked pebbles next to it. At the bottom of the page the theme is reproduced in a picture of three pebbles, which is a thoughtful touch.

I first visited the ‘About us’ page, which explains in excellent brevity how the company reached its current specialities and has real confidence-boosting interactive maps that, for a small fee, are available from Google Maps. They enable you to click on ‘pins’ stuck in the map, colour-coded for the kind of stone used, in order to see the project from Google Earth street pictures. The result is variable but it is a relatively cheap and easy way of getting interaction on to your website.

There are a lot of confidence-inspiring pictures on the site, and the only feature I could not get to work was ‘The story of stone’. According to the information, there are 10 pictures telling the story but I couldn’t get past the first one.

Nevertheless, this is a more complete website than many relaunches with some interesting features.