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We have had an increasing problem over the past few months with our advertisers not updating their contact details when they change their email addresses and this is resulting in enquiries from your customers not reaching the correct destination.

We urge all our advertisers to check their details are correct and update them if necessary.

A comment sent in today about the Return on investment (ROI)  when advertising online yet again proved that you need good quality photographs of your property if you are going to gain customers either online or with offline advertising.

The saying "A picture paints a thousand words" is very true when advertising holiday accommodation. Having poor quality, badly lit, poor angle, cluttered or blurred photographs will make your holiday accommodation look poor compared to businesses with good quality, well lit and in focus photographs.

Some interior photography tips:

1. Use a tripod, this will eliminate any camera shake which results in blurred photos.

2. Turn on the lights in the room, this helps to light any dark corners.

3. Don’t shoot direct into the windows as this will cause your camera to underexpose the rest of the room resulting in a dark room with little detail and very bright windows.

4. Use a flash on your camera, bounce the flash off a flat surface such as walls or the ceiling which helps to give a more even light throughout the room.

5. Style your rooms, include items such as towels, soap, coffee cups etc in the rooms which are normally supplied for your guests. Don’t overdo this as too much clutter will be distracting in the final shot.

6. Take your photos using a wide angle lens and shoot from corners rather than from side to side. Move any furniture to enable you to get as much of the room in the photo as possible.

This website http://www.strobist.blogspot.co.uk  has a lot of useful information for photography using on and off camera flashes and some posts on shooting indoor rooms

Due to the current block from Hotmail for our mailing lists, we are moving our mailing list services to a third party system which will allow many more options for our weekly updates.

You can subscribe to the new mailing list on http://eepurl.com/jZP1X 

For the past week the service providers who run Hotmail, live.com and MSN email accounts have blacklisted our Virtual Swanage email server from sending any messages to people who use email accounts supplied by the above. This means that if you use a @hotmail.com or @hotmail.co.uk or @live.com or .co.uk or msn email account you will not be able to receive emails from our website.

We have been in contact with the service providers of these email services and they claim that our websites have been sending emails to people who haven’t asked for them. Our mailing list system is subscription only and we do not send out messages to random addresses as they have suggested.

They refuse to tell us which emails they have received and to which address so we cannot check to see if the recipients are valid subscribers who have reported our website for sending spam emails.

Today we setup a new email server on a different server from the one which is currently blacklisted and then found that this server was also blacklisted despite the server not having an email server installed until today and it hadn’t sent any emails when we found it was already blocked.

This leads us to believe that the blacklist is much wider than our own servers and maybe affecting many more in the datacentre we use to host our web servers.

Until the service providers for Hotmail, Live.com, MSN etc unblock our email servers we regret that users of these services will not be able to receive our subscription email updates.

If you are one of our valued subscribers and haven’t been receiving your weekly updates we urge you to contact your email provider and ask them why they are blocking the emails you have subscribed to.

If you are one of the many people who have already contacted us regarding this issue, we will post an update on the blog as soon as it is resolved as we are not able to send emails back to you if you use Hotmail, live.com or MSN email accounts.