Modern Home Decorating

I am a military wife and our family is constantly moving. We are always renting our home and cannot add permanent decorating fixtures. What are some unique decorating ideas for families on the move?

You want things you can move easily without damage. One way to brighten the dull walls are fabric tapestries with poles top and bottom to keep them solid on the wall. They don’t have to be actual tapestries but the same concept with material you can even paint a solid color with a design http://www.greenyourdecor.com/276/propeller-hanging-fabric-panels-from-inhabit/

Another thing to personalize space are folding screens..These have a million uses and as many styles

Find an architectural column and put a vase with flowers on it. http://www.artistinakids.com/images/other7big.jpg

And of course wall decals can be taken down and used on the new place http://www.lushlee.com/images/wall-floor-decor/09/3/decorative-wall-decal2.jpg

I would like to hire an interior designer to help me design my home. The furniture throughout my home is high quality and is traditional in style. I may need to add or replace very few furniture items, but seriously need need help with color selection. How much should I expect to pay for color consultation for a 2 story traditional home?

On the average, most interior designers expects to receive $20 per hour. If the designer doesn’t have a degree in Interior Design but you just enjoy doing the work, you can pay him/her $10 or $12 per hour.

I am planning on decorating several properties that I have recently purchased and would like to make available for rent. Usually I would visit my local hardware store, however I am planning on doing a bulk purchase of supplies and tools for all my propertys and im looking for a good deal.

I suggest online is beat option to finding a best supplies in UK. I have also search in Google i found lots of sites like http://www.hellotrade.com/jane-packer-flower-school/ wholesale suppliers contract info in UK, leading in manufacturing all kinds of decorating materials try to search more.

The concept of using different types of abstract designs for decorating walls is gaining popularity. There are different types of designs that can be used as modern wall art to decorate the walls of your home. The vinyl wall art and canvas prints are some of the different wall art designs that are in vogue these days and are used by many people.

In case of canvas prints for modern wall art you can get designs printed on the canvas and use it to decorate your home. There are many companies that deal in canvas prints but it is advisable to choose one after careful scrutiny. Choose a company that provides good quality wall art at a reasonable price. Some of these companies help you to get your photographs on the canvas prints. You can send in the pictures to them and give your specifications along with it so that they can help you get one which suits your budget.

One of the pioneers that deal in canvas prints is CanvasDezign. Here you can either choose a picture that is available with them or send your pictures online as well. For a small modern art canvas print the image should be at least 250 kb in size while for a large canvas it should be 500 kb. If you are not happy with the colour of the image then the company provides the option for re-colouring the painting to suit your need. At the same time, if you wish to add special effects to the chosen image then that is also provided by the company. This can be done to transfer your pictures to canvas and for other abstract images as well.

The canvas print wall art can have a blank edge or may also use wrap around edge to make it attractive. To know more about this form of modern wall art you can visit any website that deals in canvas prints. This would help you to get canvas prints at very reasonable prices. The different types of designs that are available with them include abstract prints, prints related to landscapes and cities, floral prints, geometric  prints and other designs. Apart from this wall art, vinyl wall art is another popular form of modern wall art and is used extensively.

Conrad Mckee
http://www.articlesbase.com/shopping-articles/canvas-prints-for-modern-wall-art-693937.html

The bathroom is one of the most neglected rooms in the house when it comes to looking its best. This room is often thought of as needing to be practical, rather than pretty. Fortunately, bathroom interior design can be simply and easily improved upon without sacrificing utility. Attractive custom storage can help to reduce clutter in your bathroom, keeping your important toiletries and cleaning supplies neatly out of sight.

Hotel inspired bathrooms can give the feeling of get-away luxury without ever leaving home. Good lighting, clean lines, and marble surfaces make the bathroom attractive and uncluttered. A large mirror can expand the appearance of space. Other bathroom interior design ideas for a hotel-styled bathroom include monogrammed towels, attractive wallpaper, and crisp design elements.

When the bathroom is used and who will be using it will inform your bathroom interior design choices. A public powder room will be able to be more whimsical or dramatic, whereas a family bath must be more practical. Guest baths should create a welcoming and inviting space for people away from home. A master bathroom should encourage relaxation.

Be careful to choose materials that will not be damaged by water and humidity for your bathroom interior design. Wallpaper can be used in some bathrooms, but in other, the high humidity can cause it to peel and fall off. Tile is a popular choice for a bathroom, but can be damaged if your bathroom is high traffic. A good substitute for traditional tiles is vinyl tile, which can look just like ceramic or marble, but is not as easily broken. Wood cabinets are popular as well, but again, you should be careful to make sure they will not be susceptible to water damage. Wood can swell, warp, and crack in humid environments.

The right shower or tub is important in bathroom interior design. You should choose one that fits your needs, is easily cleaned, and will not be damaged easily if your bathroom sees a lot of use. Acrylic is a good choice for these situations. Traditional fiberglass is light weight, but can be easily scratched. Cast iron and cultured marble provide timeless looks, but are heavy and can be expensive. They may also require extra support under the bathroom floor. Also, try to be sure that your tub or shower is proportioned for the people who are using it. Very tall people may be frustrated by a low shower head. It is important to adjust your bathroom interior design ideas for the people who will be using the room.

Lee Dobbins
http://www.articlesbase.com/home-improvement-articles/bathroom-interior-design-tips-for-beautiful-and-practical-bathrooms-125093.html

Bathroom lights need to be practical, functional, and decorative. Ideally, they need to go with the other fixtures and fittings, which are a part of a bathroom decor. These lights need to enhance and complement a person’s interior decoration needs. They have to be a perfect blend of style with functionality. They would need to provide general or ambient illumination so that the bathroom is well lit.

When it comes to bathroom lighting, there are a plethora of choices. One can find shower lights, vanity lights, spa lights, and other lights targeting specific areas in the bathroom. While choosing these lights, one needs to give the maximum weitage to ease of use. The lights in the bathroom – used for activities such as shaving, bathing, and applying makeup – need to be easily accessible, within reach, and easy to turn on or off – as the case might be. Also, the lights in a bathroom need to be positioned carefully; placing lights in strategically over mirrors can reduce the formation of shadows to a significant extent.

The style and decor of lighting fixtures are the other factors which should be considered while buying bathroom lights. Great looking lighting fixtures in your bathroom can enhance the look of your bathrooms. And you can choose from a wide collection of bathroom lights available in myriad styles. There are modern, classical, or contemporary design options to choose from. The geometrical shaped lighting fixtures and great for modern bathrooms. The smooth and sleek looks of chrome bathroom lights go well with a contemporary decor.

Many amongst you might be using your bath areas as places of relaxation and solitude. Soaking in a warm bubble bath while keeping the lights dim might be the ideal way to reduce the stresses and strains of the day gone by for many of you. To create such an ambiance though, the right kind of bathroom lights would be needed. You can use wall scones, wall down lights, or an overhead lights with dimmers to create that perfect setting, where all your troubles would seem distant and far fetched.

From bathroom spots and down lights, wall lights, and art deco lights, to Edwardian lights and other forms of traditional bathroom lighting, the choices in bathroom light fixtures are more than one. And the best part is that there are some well-known online stores offering some amazing options in bathroom lighting at reasonable costs. These online ventures also offer crystal chandeliers, antique chandeliers, antique lanterns, and other options in decorative lighting for people who are interested. The costs are reasonable, the designs and styles are varied and interesting, and the online catalogs featuring the best designs are just a click away. No wonder, these online stores are much in demand.

To know more about an online store selling some amazing designs in bathroom lighting, you can visit periodstylelighting.

Stephen Neal

THEY’VE GOT TO VOTE FOR YOUR WEBSITE FOUR TIMES BEFORE THEY BOOK
And the odds are against each vote.

This piece has been written with the holiday home owners in Scotland in mind. But it can apply to any vacation rental owner, hotel owner, bed and breakfast owner, even caravan park and camp site owner.
You can see this and more features on the subject at www.holidayhomewebsupport.blogspot.com

Your site gets many hundreds of visitors, thousands, each year. The vast majority are not prospects, they just clicked on it out of passing interest, and a lot of the “visitors” are the search engines finding your site regularly each week.

We get probably about 3,000 genuine visitors to our site out of total 20,000 or more site visitors each year. So why don’t more of them book? Sometimes we are booked for the date they want, but most of them book with someone else. We lose their vote somewhere along the way. Yet we have one of the most successful vacation rental web sites in the country.

Every visitor is looking for something different.
We’ve just had a booking for two weeks for October. He found us through keying in “Kentallen” our local hamlet, into Google. Virtually no one searches for that term, but he did and he found us as the only self-caterer on page one. Why? Because he and his wife have just bought a house up the road and they want somewhere to stay while they move in.

Luck, sheer luck. We can’t base a marketing strategy on luck. But in a funny way each of our bookings are “lucky” in some way in that each guest is looking for something different from the next guest.

We’ve got to get them to vote for our site four times when they search. How, is the question.

The 1st vote is for the “description” of our site on page one of Google (or any other search engine but Google is overwhelmingly the most important). The “description” also carries our site name, our “url”
Our url is http://www.bayviewkentallen.co.uk and it is a poor one. If we were doing it all again we would have registered a better url name such as www.lochsidecottagescotland.com This might have helped us get up to page 1 or 2 of a bigger search term such as “Scotland”. The following is a new site and the url is a good one. http://www.loch-lomond-waterfront.co.uk. It registers the place which very high on search terms and offers a distinct benefit about the property – a waterfront location.

Tips

You’ve probably got your site set up already, but you may care to consider doing a new one for the long term. No reason why you can’t have two sites for the one property so long as they are different from each other. You may use a web designer or do it yourself, no matter, you need to know as much as he/she does. Web designers do not usually know much about marketing. Half of the problem is technical and the other half is your marketing approach.

1.Think hard about the Url you are going to use and relate it to the search terms people will use to find you. Don’t go for little search terms such as “Kentallen” but bigger ones such as “Scottishhighlands” More on this in a later piece.
2.Write and re-write your description of your site many times to make sure it fits the search terms they will use. The description goes into the html code used by the web designer, but the text should go also into the opening paragraph at the top of page one, because this is what Google uses. More about finding the best search terms in a later piece.
3.The search engines do not see your complete site, they see each page separately. So for the most critical pages in your site not all of them you need to get the right url, I mean the small extension at the end of the url which identifies each page and ends in .html such as www.yoursite.co.uk/tariffs.html You also need to get the right description for each separate page just as you do for the opening page.

This might win you the first vote. You have a fleeting instant to do this before they move on to another site or choose another search term. You need them to click on your site because it is high up on the pages they search and the description makes it look good.

Using a directory to list you.
If you are using a directory, such as Assc, then the same issue applies but in a slightly different form. You must, you absolutely must appeal to people with the finest looking photograph on the page they are looking at. This might mean not using a close up photo of your property, but rather to go for the surrounding scenery. We show our little bay. The property is there in the distance what they want from us is the beauty and the surroundings. They want a memorable holiday.

You might object to this and say they want to see your property, but what is the point of taking a moral stance if they are not going to click on your entry in the directory. You’ve lost them without even trying. Someone who does try hard to present their finest features will win them.

Now we have a click on our site and we are into the 2nd vote when they look at our opening page. They click on many different sites most of which at not at all suitable for their purpose. Now they decide either to move on in 5 seconds – or to examine our site a little further. Most move on. We can tell from our “bounce” stats on the web analyzer. (Analyzer explained later.). When they see our opening page they must be impressed straight away.

Questions:
·Does our opening page present visitors with an instant, wow! reaction? A picture of the property’s front door is not going to do it. I take it all back if you are offering them a castle or a mill, but for most of us the property itself, the building, is not what turns them on.
·Does the first page draw them into the site? Remember they are looking for a very memorable holiday, does your site tell them they are going to get this? This is where lovely design comes into play.

Our site visitors who stay with us for a bit longer are those who find the answers to their immediate questions within a couple of our site pages. Is the property available when they want it, how many will it sleep, does it accept dogs/smoking, does it look clean, is it in a nice situation, what about price?

They want fast answers to these questions. Later they’ll look again at the details, But for the moment we want to get on to their short list of properties. But they are more likely to stay on our site because they can see, for example, a wonderful view from the bedroom window which they will wake up to every morning. That’s the Wow! factor. See http://www.achnaskiacroft.co.uk/Acc.html
Grading is re-assuring to them but only half the properties in Scotland offer it. (Early results from a survey of Dmoz directory entries). It is not really powerful unless it is five star, although four stars get good bookings.

We’ve just had a honeymoon couple stay with us and they went diving in Oban harbour. That is our second pair of divers this year. The 3rd vote (5 minutes to make up their mind?) is more about “Is this area, this view, this situation going to give my family a holiday we’ll remember for a long time to come? We have this one big break a year, I’m determined that the whole family will love it” Does the area offer the kind of things my family is looking for? Is the property suitable for the family, is the kitchen equipment good, do the owners sound friendly and so on. Tricky this one, because each person is actually looking for something different to the next person and we have to meet everyone’s needs in our web site. At the end of this vote they might bookmark our site for their final short list and show it to someone else in the family perhaps. Relief.

At this stage they might e-mail us with an enquiry that’s one reason why I don’t like booking forms, I like the easy exchange offered by e-mails. I’d like to have them contact us before they’ve made up their mind.

Tips

·Have we got deep content in our web site, answering all their questions about the area? This is also important for the search engines. Does it cover every kind of guest interest adults, touring, small children, teenagers, special interests such as wild life, activities such as walking, cycling, fishing.
·Is every page well written, simple to read and contain its own wow! factor.
·Does the site sell the area, as much as the property. We are all competing with other areas of Scotland they could choose. Their alternative might be a short break in Spain – we’ve got to win them to us.

The final 4th vote is between their final short list of 3 or 4 properties. Notice it is still odds against us winning and this is an easy place to lose it with the small print or with poor photographs. How many enquiries do you get which do not turn into business? (Is the road outside the house safe for my children? Is there enough to do if it rains all the time? How far and how good is the local shop?)

For example, I’ve seen the most ghastly Terms of Business in s/catering web sites, written out as if the guests will be treated as potential scoundrels. There is absolutely no need for it, owners ought to relax and trust the guests. They can tie in Terms later in e-mails if they must. If we put them in the web site in a heavy-handed fashion, when people are comparing properties on their short list then we’ll lose the final vote. Pity.

Tips

·Take a lot of care with pages such as the booking form. I personally don’t use a booking form because as an internet user I absolutely hate and detest filling in forms. If I’m booking somewhere myself, I want to send sites an e-mail with the odd question and I want a reply quickly. If I don’t get a quick reply I move on fast. Not offering a booking form is what I call customer care. But then I haven’t got seven properties to fill.
·Get a friend to send your terms of business to half a dozen people who do not know you and ask them what they think of it and do they understand it, and does it put them off.
·Take care about putting unnecessary negatives and turn-offs prominently into your site, which you can reveal later, such as the need for a bond. In a nice way we do say “no smoking” and “no pets” up front because these are mandatory requirements for us but we also explain why, rather gently. Our terms of business are very gently expressed and are never needed.

The odds of winning each one of these four votes are against us. The odds of winning them all are very low indeed. That is why our site needs a huge number of visitors. We are each competing with Fife, Skye and the Highlands as well as with Southern Spain and other properties in our area.

There will be more detail on all of the topics later. The dark autumn nights are looming. Good time to review the web approach.

JW
You can see the way things have been sorted out if you look at the following site. I wish we had develop a better url site address.
www.bayviewkentallen.co.uk

John Winkler
http://www.articlesbase.com/hotels-articles/top-tips-on-web-site-design-for-holiday-home-owners-hotels-vacation-rentals-caravan-parks-self-caterers-and-bed-and-breakfast-web-site-owners-61822.html