The Myster Surfer visits the websites of the industry and reports what he sees. This month he took a tour of the new website of Stone Age.

A wiser man than I am once told me that when you are making a website you don’t have to produce the best site in the world, just a better one than your competitors. Being better than your competitors in most industries did not used to be that difficult. But it is becoming more difficult all the time.

Just take a look at the new website of Stone Age. It is a good site. It is well designed, clean, clear, excellently and extensively illustrated with a straightforward message to buy stone and buy it from Stone Age at one of their three showrooms in London, Bristol and Hempstead in Hertfordshire.

It explains and demystifies stone in a way that the industry used to be reluctant to do. In downloadable PDF datasheets it points out that stone will need to be cared for and introduces some of Lithofin’s products for doing that. It does not hide from the fact that stone can stain but, like all good marketing, turns a negative into a positive by saying how Stone Age pre-seal all their stone before it leaves the factory and that scratches and dirt that accumulate on floors and limestone surfaces are all part of the desirable patina that only improves them with age.

Interestingly, Stone Age have a page presenting as one of their USPs (unique selling points) the fact that they dry the stone as well as seal it before it leaves the factory. It will not have occurred to UK customers, who know nothing about quarry sap or the amount of water used in processing stone, that stone needs drying. It is different in Italy, where many householders have become familiar with the colour change in stone as it dries. It will be interesting to see if customers start asking about it and other companies start to mention it.

Adding something like this that educates visitors to the site does help establish Stone Age as the experts.

Information that the customer wants is not hidden somewhere in extraneous detail about geological time. It is there, in front of them, stripped bare and unequivocal. Whoever provided the text for this site did a good job.

There is no shopping basket but there are some prices on the site, for flooring. Elsewhere prices are not given. I know prices depend on exactly what you are buying, but I am convinced the absence of prices drives more customers away than their inclusion would.

Some readers will take issue with some of the stone names – flooring called Barn Stone and Field Stone or any of the other made-up names. But does the consumer really suffer as a result? The debate will go on. The stones are displayed on an amused groan-inducing ‘Rock Chart’.

Search engine optimisation is pretty good. Google ‘stone floors’ and Stone Age comes up on the first page. But ‘travertine’ is used as a search query about 14 times more frequently than ‘stone floors’ and here Stone Age appeared on the fourth page, which is not bad, although a lot of people will have got no further than Travertine Warehouse or Topps Tiles on the first page.

Yes, this is a good ‘here we are’ site and a couple of years ago it would have rated among the best in the stone industry. But, as I said, it is getting harder to be better than your competitors and there are ever more good ‘here we are’ sites. This one establishes the credentials of Stone Age better than those of some of its competitors but it is becoming time consuming to both satisfy the expectations of users and carry out the ‘behind the scenes’ tasks needed to establish and keep a website at maximum visibility.

Nevertheless, my Rating reflects the skill and attention to detail with which this site has been created. Rating: 88%