According to a new IBM advertisement, e-business is entering chapter two – goodbye, cheap thrills, hello, bottom line benefits.
A pioneer in commercial websites was Medite of Europe, the MDF producer based in Ireland, later acquired by Willamette Industries to become Willamette Europe. It added Mediland MDF in 1998 and Darbo particleboard in 1999, and now employs more than 400 people in France, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK.
With all those changes to assimilate, the company had been looking to modernise its website for a year or more. It is surprising that Willamette has ignored e-commerce. It bills its site (www.willamette-europe.com) as no-nonsense and in this it has been very successful. Information about products and services is broken down into concise bites and displayed in a small panel in the centre of the screen, requiring little or no scrolling to view.
E-commerce is being embraced by exchange sites, such as TimberWeb, and one of the latest is Corridor.com (www.corridor.com) for the furniture industry. It has been launched by a group including an offshoot of the publisher United Business Media International with trade partners. It promises to source sales from April and raw materials by autumn. There is no indication of potential users and charges have yet to be finalised.
While it looks good, visitors have to accept a cookie to gain access and are then subjected to a barrage of follow-up cookies.
Buildingmats.com (www.buildingmats. com) is to trade materials for the building trade. It is a site of free or cheap listings to attract suppliers. This pulls in the visitors in the hope of generating enough interest to have suppliers agree to advertise, and then for the site to take a slice of the deals completed online. It is promising 100,000 visitors a month.
The costs are in line with many UK sites: £5 for four weeks for a basic listing, £10 for four weeks for a customised page, and £400 for an e-commerce function. There are various other charges for links, ads and a 1% commission on e-commerce sales.
There is no obvious bricks and mortar information on the site, except a declaration that it is an independent company, Buildingmats Ltd, together with its com-pany registration number. This is unusual, as common advice for Internet users is not to pass financial information to a website without knowing its off-line identity.
As a test site, though, it is one of the more user-friendly as there are dummy registration and credit card identities to test buy and sell.
Homebuilder.co.uk (www.homebuilder. co.uk) is a new directory and advertising site for self builders in Scotland and the North. It has brought information together as a first point of access for self builders. Basic listings are free, with £150 a year for something more. The details of the Aberdeen-based Internet design company that owns it are clearly labelled.
Also in Scotland is the newly-launched website of the Scottish Timber Trade Association (www.stta.org.uk), which represents timber importers, sawmillers, timber merchants, timber agents and builders merchants within Scotland, and the Scottish arm of the Timber Trade Federation.
It is an interesting site in that it is almost a newsletter online, with the home page taken up with a welcoming message from STTA president Bruce Muirhead. It also has an unsophisticated look and uses old-style woodgrain graphics. The information on sourcing, specifiers and members is highly useable, though, with some well-designed tables.
The European Federation of Parquet Industries (www.parquet.net) also uses wood-style colours, with shades of green dividing parts of the screen. It is a promotional site using the Internet to spread the word on parquet, such as facts and figures, uses and a list of manufacturers.
Although it goes beyond the newsletter style of the STTA, it would benefit from more information for members, and some of the information has not been changed in four months (see Ghost Sites).
New company sites include Directdoors.com (www.directdoors.com) from The Door Centre in Edinburgh, which promises direct door sales in five to 21 days. It is an extension of the company’s successful brochure business which has 4,000 customers and is boosted with a new factory and £250,000 of equipment to handle increased capacity.
The site is basic, but not amateurish as a user can progress through the categories by clicking on pictures of doors, or use a quick select method. There is clear price and delivery information.
Preston-based timber merchant Page and Taylor (www.pageandtaylor.co.uk) has joined the web with a site with a home-built feel. There is information about the com-pany and its products and services found behind basic buttons, but over-shadowed by historic photographs as a background.
A couple of non-timber sites are worth a quick mention – one to prove the point about maintaining a site.
Ghost Sites (www.disobey.com/ghostsites) is a crypt of horrors – failed websites and dotcoms that are dead and buried, but are still on the Net. There are many examples and a recent addition is a collection of images that document the 100-plus failed dotcoms from the latter part of last year.
There is a serious point. Having a good reason for a site, making it worthwhile and keeping it worthwhile are big stumbling blocks of being on the Internet. There are many commercial sites that have ‘latest news’ sections not updated for months, contact information for people who left months ago, phone, fax and e-mail details that have changed and even change of ownership, with its important legal information, ignored.
While Ghost Sites has a serious side in that it displays glaring examples of past folly, www.hecklers.com has no redeeming features, other than its mission to be the most popular site for bored employees and students who should be studying or working. It has many features – cyberbabes, cartoons and jokes – and many bizarre contributions to web culture. Don’t let the boss catch you.
