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.floortesters.com.

There is a new website just launched specifically to provide slip resistance testing for floors in the UK, although the team that has set it up also offers full floor design services.

On the Floortesters.com website there is an explanation of the new venture. It has been established by three guys previously with 4 Earth Solutions. Two of them, Paul Singh and Keith Wilson, have apparently been involved in talks with some of the largest insurance companies in the UK for the past six months about the development of a new type of insurance package to combat the billions of pounds that are paid out in slip and trip claims.

This new policy, they say, will encompass a comprehensive package that will help to increase floor safety, reduce the amount of accidents and claims and reduce insurance premiums on commercial floors by at least 15%. “We believe that this package will revolutionise the way floors are insured worldwide,” they say on the website.

Presumably it involves slip resistance testing that presents the opportunity the founders of Floortesters.com have established their business to benefit from.

Is the website going to help them reach the level of business they hope for?

Being new, it is a bit early to tell. At the moment, the term entered into a search engine to find Floortesters.com has to be pretty specific: floor testers. Make it singular or ‘floor tests’ and they disappear from the first two pages of Google. Searching for ‘slip resistance’ or ‘floor design’ does not produce them, either, although that will probably change over time as the site is used more.

As a new site, they might benefit from the latest major algorithm change that Google implemented at the end of April. It is called Penguin this time. Last year’s black-and-white algorithm code was a decidely uncuddly Panda, which left a lot of webmasters spitting blood as they slipped down the search engine results pages (SERPs) for no (initially) obvious reason.

It became clear with time that the main aim of Panda was to downgrade those pesky websites that simply pinch material from other sites, but it also impacted a lot of sites for relatively minor quality misdemeanours. Penguin, on the other hand, has hit websites that have been overdoing the search engine optimisation in order to rise in the SERPs. It has especially hit sites that have been buying or otherwise engineering links, and sites that have been 'keyword stuffing' (ie overdoing the use of the keyword phrases or terms that they believe surfers will use). Many established sites have been clobbered and sent into SERPs oblivion by the Penguin.

Google (and it is not alone in this) is placing more emphasis on social network interaction all the time and Floortesters.com has it covered with both a Twitter and a LinkedIn account. There are feeds on the Home Page. Again, the website is new so there’s not been too much action so far.

If social networking is to be included on websites it needs to be used, which is an onerous task, as everyone is discovering.

I used to complain when ‘news’ pages on websites were out-of-date with ‘news’ from a year or more ago. With social networks it looks out-of-date if it was not posted today, which is leading to increasingly pointless rubbish being posted. I would much rather nothing was posted for days or even weeks than be subjected to the marketing hyperbole (otherwise known as bullshit) that is starting to emanate from business sites.

If people do find the website of Floortesters.com they should be pleased enough with the result, although I am not a great fan of black backgrounds – they have an impact but there are too many of them. I prefer something brighter.

Like a good many websites, it could do with someone to check the text and remove the typographical errors (which I’m always reluctant to mention because it leads to discussions of black pots and kettles). But the company’s proposition is easy to understand and sufficiently supported by details such as case studies of projects worked on by those involved in the new venture. The contact page provides an address and there are telephone numbers and email addresses at the top of every page, which is always a good sign.