Design studio and website updates

It has been a while since my last update so, in an effort to make amends, here is a bucket load of info.

The studio is coming along, although not as quickly as perhaps I would like it to. Most of the furniture is now in place and I had a beautiful piece of stone fitted last week. The stone itself is “Tigris Sand” and is made of Silestone. It comes with a 10 year manufacturers warrantee and it is going to complement the Castel Oak units by Schuller that I have matched it with.

As a bit of a twist I am fitting a Rangemaster sink and tap that has a square waste plug. These are quite unusual at the moment but when you visit the studio (as I hope you will) you’ll see just how classy it looks and will want one for yourself.

At the back of the studio I am fitting four appliances by Luce Hotpoint. Two ovens, a steam oven and a coffee machine. Three guesses which one will be getting used the most. They aren’t wired up yet, but once they are, I am looking to film a couple of demonstrations for the blog. Fortunately, I will be attending a Luce demo day in London later this month. I might even get a few cooking tips while I’m there, which I’ll be happy to pass on once I’ve tested them.

Most of the contemporary handleless Schuller furniture is now installed on the right hand side of the studio. There is still a bit of tweaking to do and all the soft close mechanisms need fitting before I would demonstrate them to a prospective customer.

It is a very difficult stage for me at the moment. I want to open the studio and get on with the work of designing beautiful rooms for my customers but I know that first impressions count. I will not open the doors until I am one hundred percent happy with the way the studio looks and performs.

Hopefully, people will appreciate my attention to detail and slight case of OCD. This level of care and attention is something I transfer into all of my projects. I simply will not settle for second best in my work and my previous clients would testify that the work I have done for them has exceeded their expectations.

Sorry about that bit of trumpet blowing. Time to shift the focus onto someone else’s efforts, to whom I am extremely grateful.

For those of you who have visited my website a number of times in the last few months, you may have noticed that visually things have changed and evolved as time has passed. I’m led to believe that is the way of things with websites. Unlike print media, brochures and leaflets, a website is a far more fluid affair. I can upload a page, take a look at it, and if there is something I don’t like about it, I can change it. There and then. Back in the days of the printed promotional leaflet, the odd spelling mistake, the wrong picture or the bad colour choice was there for ever. Too expensive to recall, incorrect leaflets just had to go out anyway, sometimes with disasterous results. Thank goodness a website can be tweaked without too much trouble.

My chief website tweaker is my husband Mike. Web design is an expensive business and having my husband take care of all things web related is a major part of my “low overheads” strategy. If I had outsourced the “Your Space” web design process to another company and paid them by the hour, I would now be battling a bigger deficit than George Osborne.

Mike isn’t a professional web designer and I’m sure there are a few web gurus who can pick holes in his efforts. But he has managed to achieve quite a bit on weekends and evenings, whilst still helping out around the house and baking the odd loaf of bread (it’s a great way to relieve stress apparently).

Those of you using an up to date web browser and fairly modern computer will notice that he has worked hard on the typography of the site, as well as paying loads of attention to how the pictures look and line up.

I’m particularly pleased with his solution for the “six reasons to buy Schuller” page. It was quite a challenge to put most of the contents of a large brochure onto one web page. Viewers don’t want to be presented with too much info when they first land on a page. Mike’s solution was to hide the content away until the user clicks on one of the six reasons. Then the page suddenly comes to life.

Slightly less glamorous but never the less important, we now have a terms and conditionspage as well as a privacy policy. These are really essential elements of any business related website and I urge you to take a look at them if you are looking for Your Space to design and install a new kitchen, bedroom, study or living room.

I’m hugely grateful to Mike for all his effort and support so far, long may it continue. Now get back in the kitchen an bake me another loaf.