WEB REVIEW

Web Review: For Your Customers
Spark Your Style

A site provides profiles of decorating styles and do-it-yourself tutorials to help your clients find and express their personal style.

REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER M. LEPORINI

Web Site: artSparx.com
URL: www.artsparx.com

What the Site Offers

Helping buyers imagine themselves in a home is an important part of residential real estate sales. artSparx.com, a Calif.-based Web site, familiarizes users with the decorative details that transform a house into a home. Its Home Decor channel includes how-to guides for decorating projects, magazine-style features on home styles, and home-improvement articles. Additionally, the site offers resources for and about artists.

Real estate professionals can use the site to build their architectural and interior decorating knowledge and to provide a resource to their customers to help them visualize and implement an interior decorating idea to complement a home purchase.

Most of the site’s resources are free; however, the site provides additional home-improvement tutorials and animated demonstrations exclusively for paid registered members. The site offers a two-day trial ($4.99), or one-month ($14.99) and one-year ($75.00) subscriptions.

Valuable Site Features for Real Estate Professionals

• Weekly Style Feature. artSparx.com’s style features explain the hallmarks of more than a dozen architectural styles—such as Victorian, Tudor, and Bungalow—that include the interior and exterior details. These photo-illustrated articles, which are collected in the artSparx Style Archive, examine decorative touches for walls, ceilings, accessories, and furniture. Other articles provide historical overviews, such as “Window Styles Through the Ages.”
  
• Quick Chart. Real estate professionals can use these quick-reference charts as handouts for customers. The charts offer at-a-glance information on paint drying times and specifications for choosing the correct paint roller size, paint sheen, primer, and sandpaper, among other topics. Other handouts include Clean-up Techniques and Safety Tips for various types of paints and varnishes.
  
  Valuable Site Features for Your Customers
  
• Step-by-Step Features. These articles walk users through painting techniques that can add a sophisticated polish to home interiors. Some of these projects include color washes with acrylic glazes, pouncing, and antiquing. The section also includes how-to guides for home improvement projects such as patching drywall.
  
  All tutorials include explanatory images and some include a demonstration video clip. Additionally, each tutorial provides a difficulty rating to assist users in evaluating whether a project is at their skill level. (Paying members have access to advanced tutorials, such as mural painting, that require a more advanced skill set.)
  
• Paint Calculator. This interactive feature helps users estimate how much paint they’ll need to complete an interior painting project. Users enter information on a room’s dimensions, and the site calculates how many cans of paint will be required.
  
• colorScheme system. artSparx.com’s color learning center explains basic color theory and how to incorporate these ideas to create decorative color schemes using complimentary or contrasting colors. The artSparx Color Palette feature, available only to paying customers, provides color recipes for users looking to mix their own paints for decorative glazes.
  
• Ask artSparx. This free bulletin board allows users to post questions on home improvement, color, home décor, and decorative arts, such as staining and color washing. According to the site, artSparks.com experts answer most questions within several hours. Users can offer their own insights and also browse past replies in a categorized archive.
  
• Glossary of Terms. This resource defines home decorating materials, tools, and techniques. It explains different types of paints, varnishes, and lacquers used in home-improvement projects and the methods by which they are applied.
  
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  Suggest a Site For Review
  Every week, REALTOR® Magazine Online's Web review editor surfs the Internet to find sites useful to your business and off-hours lives. Have a favorite real estate Web site that you would like to see reviewed? Send your suggestions to Chris Leporini at mediatech@realtors.org. All decisions on which sites will be reviewed are completely at the discretion of REALTOR® Magazine Online's editorial staff. Please note: this column does not review individual practitioner or brokerage sites.
  
  The column's focus includes free sites, as well as sites that charge for goods and services, but which still offer a free component of practical, sustained value to real estate practitioners, such as a free newsletter or regular news information.
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  REALTOR® Magazine Online's "Web Review" summarizes the content of Web sites that may be of interest to members. NAR and REALTOR® Magazine Online are not responsible for, and nothing in the Web site profile shall constitute NAR's or REALTOR® Magazine Online's endorsement of, the web site, its content, products and services, or its provider. NAR and REALTOR® Magazine Online believe the information contained in this profile was correct and accurate as of the time it was prepared, but do not warrant or guarantee the accuracy or completeness of that information and are not responsible for changes in the Web site. Members should conduct their own independent review of the Web site prior to any use of Web site, its content, products, or services to determine their suitability for the member's intended purpose.
  
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