This is a great range of gifts and ideas for babies and young children of all ages, where you can buy personalised cutlery, clocks and adventure books, baby and toddler sleeping bags, magic lanterns, colourful wall hangings and really clever storage ideas. There's the Squishy, Squirty Bath Book, Jungle Bowling Set (soft toys) and Toy House Play Mat plus loads more clever and innovative ideas. This would be a clever place to find something really different from the normal baby gift.

Send a Thought offers prettily boxed and wrapped gifts for just about every occasion, from the Box of Relaxation, which contains Sleepy Tea, a True Grace candle and a Pocket Lavender Garden to the clever Photo Thoughts, where you can download your picture and have it sent out in a leather frame and Little Thoughts - extremely reasonably priced and beautifully presented chocolates, scented gifts and more. There's something here for everyone, from kids to grannies, and everything will bring a smile.

This is another retailer offering 'basket' gift sets for new babies but the difference here is that these go right up to the luxury end of the spectrum (although starting quite reasonably), with the 'Loveheart' baby basket containing a babygro, cardigan, pram shoes, fleece and photo album and the ultimate 'Fudge' baby basket offering also a cableknit blanket, hand embroidered towel and babygro and handmade photo album, with everything exquisitely packaged.

This is a website just for babies (as you'd expect), and they offer a really lovely range of ideas. Choose from Welcome Home baby boxes with names such as Flower Power and Lullaby, soft lambswool, fleece and cashmere blankets and Christening gifts such as silver charms, chiming spoon and hand knitted heirloom cot blanket. There's also the Yummy Mummy Gift Set to make sure that the new mum isn't forgotten.

There are quite a variety of gifts on offer here for all sorts of occasions including christenings and birthdays. Go straight to the christening gifts section, where there are screen printed photograph albums, children’s traditional chairs, silver spoons and bowls and gorgeous horn and silver accessories. In my opinion you couldn’t go wrong with the beautiful hammered silver bowl they have here and which I haven’t seen anywhere else. The only problem is you’ll probably want to use it first.

In its Christening Gifts section Richmond Silver has quite a wide selection of ideas, ranging from a hallmarked sterling silver bear necklace at under £20 to a heavy gauge hand made silver christening cup for around £200. There are some very good, classic ideas here with which you’re unlikely to go wrong, although I would recommend staying with the sterling silver which is in most cases very reasonably priced, rather than straying off into silver plate, no matter how pretty it looks.

There’s no question that most people give silver for christenings, or beautiful baby clothes. Here’s something slightly different that will almost certainly be used for a long time. The Wool Company’s 100% pure new merino wool blankets have whip-stitched edges and come in a variety of colours from soft blue (polar ice check) and natural cream to wonderful guava check and carmine red. You can also buy nursery sheepskin here and pastel checked ‘cuddle’ blankets plus wonderful blankets for the home.