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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.

We have added a new local gym based in the Swanage Bay View Holiday Park to the business listings.

Joe's Gym is a family owned, independent gym with a focus on customer service. Joe and Sarah Shepherd have a wealth of knowledge and experience in the fitness industry.

http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/directory/info.aspx?id=853

New events in April at the Burngate Stone Carving Centre

Situated in the beautiful Isle of Purbeck, Dorset with views over Swanage Bay, Burngate is the perfect location for families to come and enjoy expert tuition on traditional sculpture, letter and stone carving classes, for people of all ages and abilities.

Easter Craft Fair
Friday 6th - Monday 9th April
10.00am-4.30pm

Courses taking place over the weekend:
Family have-a-go stone carving
Saturday 7th - Monday 9th April
2.00pm-4.00pm

Freeform carving
Sunday 8th - Monday 9th April
9.30am-4.30pm

Local art and craft demonstrations will be taking place throughout the day, along with a gallery of sculpture and stone carving. Stone carving courses will be taking place for all the family over the Easter Craft Fair weekend. Refreshments and homemade cakes will also be available.

Family Open Day - New!
Saturday 28th April
9.30am-4.30pm

Free children's art activities
Free stone carving tasters
Free tasters of art and craft courses and demonstrations

Come and join in the fun at Burngate for the very first Family Open Day, new for 2012. With lots of courses for all the family, there is certainly something for everyone. The tea room will be open for visitors to stock up on delicious homemade cakes and cream teas – perfect for a day of crafts and stone carving!

Booking is essential due to limited space. For further details and to book a course please visit www.burngatestonecentre.co.uk or call 01929 439405. You should dress for mess and lots of fun!

We have launched an updated version of our Android Swanage Guide app to the Android Market

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.virtualswanage.swanageguide

The new app has many updates including new overall look, sharing facility, new maps and updated nearby search system.

Over the past few months we have had an increase in calls complaining that accommodation advertisements have been removed from the site, this is because the renewal invoices which are sent via email have not been paid.

We send the renewal invoices before the due date and we also send a reminder after the due date.

The website automatically removes any adverts that have not paid their invoice thirty (30) days after the renewal date. This is an automated process.

The invoices are sent to the contact email you entered for your accommodation listing so please ensure that this is correct.

Advertisers (accommodation) can login to their admin section at any time to view their invoices and pay any outstanding ones.

Some email clients will put emails with attachments in the Junk or Spam folders so please can all our accommodation advertisers add payments at virtualswanage.co.uk to their safe senders list. (change at to @ and remove spaces for full email address).

This will save all our advertisers a lot of problems and loss of customers from the Virtual Swanage website due to expired advertisements.

If you do not remember your login details, the accommodation admin login page has the facility to request your login details which will be sent to the email address you registered with your entry.

We are pleased to welcome Bayview Swanage to the website in the accommodation section.

http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/accommodation/details.aspx?id=306