Forest of Dean Stone Firms, in Parkend, Gloucestershire, have launched a new website intended to be a platform to educate and enlighten their customers to the diversity of pennant sandstone.

Since a third of the company was sold to the Hart family’s Royal Forest Pennant business, which, through successful marketing, has supplied the stone for a good number of major paving projects, there has, perhaps, been a tendency to forget that the stone is ideal for all kinds of work, not just paving. The new website hopes to correct that.

Its design is taken from the Royal Forest Pennant site (www.forestpennant.com), so that the two are indistinguishable apart from the names on them.

Using fodstone.co.uk, you are immediately offered the option of entering either Forest of Dean Stone Firms or Royal Forest Pennant sites.

However, the same courtesy is not extended from the Royal Forest Pennant site to the FoD Stone Firms’ site, not even on the contact page. FoD, on the other hand, do have a link to the Royal Forest site on their contacts page. As far as I could see, there is no link at all from the Royal Forest site to the FoD site.

The FoD site promotes the stone as architectural stonemasonry, garden & landscaping and building & walling stones, while the Royal Forest Pennant site offers natural stone paving and hard landscaping.

Search engine optimisation? When I searched for ‘pennant sandstone’, FoD Stone Firms did not appear on the first page of Google. I searched for ‘pennant paving’. FoD Stone Firms were nowhere to be found on the first few pages, although Royal Forest Pennant were in third and fourth positions of the first page. ‘Pennant walling’ and, again, Royal Forest Pennant were on the first page with a PDF of a brochure but FoD were nowhere to be found on the first three pages.

The fodstone site might move up the search engine rankings with use. But will it be widely used? No doubt customers wanting to buy the stone will have a look at it, but once you have been through it and found out a bit about the stone (usefully including test results) is there much to entice you back? There are no prices – and prices do bring people back so they can price up other products in your range once they have chosen one. With no prices there is clearly no way to buy stone on the site, but neither are there the little interactive gadgets for visitors to use such as a ready reckoner to work out how much stone they might need – gimmicks, of course, but they do keep people on your site which gives them more time to absorb your message and remember your name.

As the site is a bit like a Powerpoint presentation, a nice touch is that you can work your way through it by clicking a continuation arrow at the bottom right hand corner of the pages, a bit like going through an on-line magazine using YuDu but without the page turning graphics.

There is a section on sustainability and the new micro-hydro generating system that was due to be switched on at FoD Stone Firms’ sizeable and well-equipped works this month (December). There is a little confusion about just how much electricity it will generate – in one section it says 50% of the company’s electricity requirements, in another 70% – but it is certainly making the right noises, especially when the SISTech report into encapsulated carbon is also used as an authority for the low carbon emission level of extracting and processing stone.

The sections showing the quarry and stone processing seem to present a good opportunity for some videos but the opportunity is not exploited.

The pages on this site are certainly easy to look at and are illustrated with some good photographs. As a presentation of the stone it is clear and straightforward and will help people making their first contact with the company or wanting to know more about the stone. It is basically a ‘here we are’ site, but a good example of a ‘here we are’ site. Rating: 74%.