In 1958, Her Majesty the Queen made Britain’s first telephone trunk call, from Bristol to Edinburgh. Today, she unveiled the latest design of the British Monarchy website, at www.royal.gov.uk, its third since it launched in 1997.

Sobriety and simplicity are the watchwords of the new homepage, which went live shortly after 1pm on Thursday.

Everything a visitor could reasonably want to learn about the royal family is there, divided into 12 colour-coded sections which deal with everything from the life of the Queen herself to a history of the royals and their treasures.

But don't be fooled by the easy navigation. The royals may not have opted for the latest in Flash animation, but there is a treasure trove of video and personal photographs on nearly every page, in elegantly presented carousel-style slideshows, while videos open in their own pop-up windows. The videos take their feeds directly from the Royal Channel, which the Queen launched on YouTube in 2007. Any photo you choose to inspect in closer detail will pop up to sit transparently on top of the main page.

A timeline of the royal relationship with technology takes us back to Queen Victoria’s first encounter with the telephone, while scans of correspondence from the archive include a letter from the Prince Regent (later George IV) congratulating the Duke of Wellington on his victory in the battle of Vittoria in 1813.

Perhaps most exciting for modern royal watchers, though, is the ability to track the movements and plans of all the royals using a built-in Google map. Click on one of the drawing pins that dot the country and a date and purpose of visit will be displayed. At times the text is too wide for the image window, but this is surely a glitch that will soon be repaired.

The previous incarnation of the site used a surfeit of regal purple which could be tiring, but I think I prefer it to the browns on display in certain sections here.

Delve deeper into other areas of the site, and other minor problems reveal themselves. The History of the Monarchy page looks unfinished and unbalanced, while the history of the monarchs is less successfully presented now, via links to text articles, than in the site's former incarnation, when it was done using dropdown menus.

Overall, the tone is warm, but distant and respectful. One would, after all, scarcely expect the Queen to invite us to follow her Twitter feed.

The new royal site was designed by Bang Communications of Basingstoke. Mark Wilson, a director of Wilson Fletcher, a rival web design specialist whose clients include The Science Museum and Discovery Channel, was less than complimentary about the new site.

"It's very disappointing," he told The Times. "I don't think this expresses how we feel about our monarchy at all. It feels more like a library to me. I really thought that they would do something more progressive this time, try to get under the skin of what the monarchy means. This looks more like a set of Google search results and involves wading through huge amounts of text."

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