Stancliffe Stone have a smart new presence on the Internet with one of the most comprehensive websites the industry has to offer, as befits their position as leaders among British stone quarriers.

The information is comprehensive, presenting not just the 16 sandstones, limestones and ironstone they sell but also a range of finished products made from it and including a section covering their Panash rainscreen cladding system.

For the consumer, they have not shied away from including prices and there is an on-line shop from which you can buy everything from Stanton Moor pitched face walling for £53.37 a square metre or garden walling from £35.25/m² to a £1,467.59 fire surround.

The site does not appear high on the list of most searches yet, but it will improve as more people use it.

From the home page you can select from eight categories to enter the site – Specifiers, Conservation, Contractors, House Builders, Stone Fixers, Landscaping, Home Owners, Merchants. If one of those does not cover you, you are probably on the wrong site.

Each of the stones has its own page with down-loadable PDF datasheets containing test results. There are CE marks on the products where applicable, ISO 9001 or PAS 99 accreditation, and a 10-year guarantee. There are even guides to general construction detailing available in PDF, AutoCad and SolidWorks formats on request, along with a button to request samples.

The site is searchable – and the searches produce a good list of pages covering the subject quickly – although the search is not infallible. For example, enter ‘Cladding’ and the first result is about Panash rainscreen but enter ‘Panash’ and you get the message “Sorry, no matching results, please re-try.”

Interconnectivity between pages is good and there are links on all pages to other pages on related subjects.

There is a page on sustainability even thought it does not seem to have received as much attention as most of the other pages. Perhaps that reflects a lack of interest in the subject by customers. There is only one connection on the page and that is to the ‘Wildlife Trust’ (although it has renamed itself the EcoHealth Alliance), Stancliffe Stone having achieved the organisation’s Biodiversity Benchmark at their Stoke Hall site.

My bête noire, as regular readers will know, is websites with a news section containing an entry or two from the time the site was launched some years ago. Stancliffe’s site has a news section and, as you would hope, it includes up-to-the-minute entries. When I looked at it, the latest entry was from just a couple of days earlier and the entry before that was from the end of October. There was a good selection of news from the company going back to 2004.

If I have a general criticism, it is the lack of a trade area that customers from the industry can use to order their stone on their normal terms. admittedly this is not an industry particularly attuned to using the Internet to make its purchases, but the move towards it is inexorable and such areas are beginning to appear on suppliers’ websites.

This is a good website containing a lot of useful, relevant information presented clearly and directly by RJ Design Associates, who designed it. I rate it 89%.