INSTEAD of the standard homepage layout, automotive industry recruitment agency Steele-Dixon opts for a letter from managing director Martin Steele as its greeting.

It is a clever way of outlining the company’s activities but isn’t exactly attention-grabbing.

From here on things take a more familiar route, with left-hand links including a News section.

It’s possible to register an opening by filling out an online form or phoning in the details of a current vacancy. Your criteria will then be checked against a database of 15,000 registered applicants.

To register with Steele-Dixon, all you have to do is click on the ‘Get Registered’ button, which features on every page of the site, and fill in a quick online form.

After registering, Steele-Dixon will review your details against current and new jobs. You will be contacted when the company believes it has found a job that fits your criteria, before it discloses your CV to an employer.

There is a lot of useful information to be found on this site, like the tips on CV layout, getting the best from Steele-Dixon, interview preparation and the CV checklist. But clumsy navigation makes it difficult to get to certain sections.

The current vacancies section allows you to search using ‘keyword’ and ‘location’ filters. This enables the user to find a particular job quickly.

Some vacancies were titled ‘hot job’, but there was no clear reason why.

Once you click on a specific vacancy, more detailed information is given. The ‘email a link to a friend’ function was a nice touch.

Despite some sections of the site containing a lot of white space, simplicity of design makes the site easy to look at.

But use of colour is limited to cool blues, grey and white which gives an almost medical feel while a bigger use of pictures would be better to fill up some of the empty spaces.

The lowdown

The site: www.steele-dixon.co.uk.

We like: Practical functions work well – finding a job was easy

We don’t like: Design and clunky navigation lets the site down