What's the best way to purchase commodities such as Gold & Silver?

Folks, I'm looking for some advice. I have saved hard for a number of years but am fed up of poor interest rates from bank deposit accounts. I'm interested in getting into commodities and spendings 10-12k approx. I would like advice on how to buy into something like silver where i can track the actual price of the commodity and then sell at the appropriate time. What is the safest and quickest way to do this? Your thoughts?

you can be ETFs in most commodities such as Gold, Silver, Copper. But what you want are ones that are backed by physical stocks not based on returns on an index as these latter ones are created by the provider using commodity futures. In the latter there is often large cost of carry on rolling over these futures positions. The physical backed ETFs would be less common.

Here's an article that might provide inspiration - re Gold for example.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/258691-4-physically-backed-gold-etfs

You can buy these ETFs through most custody accounts provided by retail banks. I know I can purchase them quite cheaply via my NIB custody account with similar commission to Funds.

You should have a look at Bullion Vault

You buy and sell gold and silver online in real time, pretty easy to use, plus they give you a free gram of gold to play around with so you can get used to the system.

I've been using them for a year, and never had any trouble.

I have used www.goldmoney.com for a number of years now and have found them very good.