You always wanted to create your home environment full of life. But you don't possess the skill to utilize the space at its best. Read on this blog to make your dream of home designing true.

Interior designing is such expertise that needs to be acquired after several years of real-life practice. So, to start interior designing, you should learn the basics first. Get through the guide to understand the various ways of creating a perfect residential place.

Understand Your Available Space

When you opt for room designing, first, you need to have a basic understanding of your space. It would be best to consider multiple factors while getting into interior decoration. Still, the most helpful thing is identifying the room sizes so that you can craft an idea in your mind that looks soothing in open eyes.

Always let the natural light come into your flat to make it germs-free. It will also help your space look big. Instead of scattering plenty of aesthetic furniture here and there, you should keep only the necessary one. The more you keep the space unoccupied, the greater it becomes functional.

Place Furniture Cautiously

With home designing, the first thing you should bring into mind is understanding the positioning of furniture. There's no meaning in placing furniture only aesthetically, but it should also ensure utmost functionality.

You need to place the smaller furniture opposite the larger ones to draw special interest from your visitors to your living room. Follow some of the basic rules to make the rooms spacious.

· Place the sofa facing window or large piece of art

· Keep the dining table beside a window to let the natural light come in

· The positioning of the television should be against such a wall so that it can be visible from multiple directions

· Emphasize installing a closet and a dresser on alternative sides of your bedroom

· Settle down at the study table near the balcony or beside a large window to stay energized all the time

Use the Right Wall Color and Lighting Fixtures

To have a positive vibe all around your apartment, you should paint the walls with calming colors. If you want to create a relaxing atmosphere, suggest your Cape Town interior architects opt for a light color.

On the other hand, dark colors signify an intimate atmosphere throughout the rooms. To represent your creativity level at its best, lighting plays a huge role. Choose different types of light fixtures for the specific spaces to give importance to both the natural and the artificial ones.

Personalize the Space with Artworks and Plants

It would be best to decorate your home as you want to feel inside it. If you are obsessed with a color that makes you comfortable, you can add them to your favorite wall. Adding a little greenery around the house can make it welcoming for visitors.

Keep the larger art pieces in the large spaces to have a balanced feel. Keep the room as spacious as possible to make it serene. You can decorate the living space with the elements you collected from your travels. With the right placement of furniture and lighting installation, you can change the vibe of an enclosed space.

Everyone loves exquisite furnishing, the luxurious feeling of textiles and satins, and well-decorated walls. The interior magazines are unfortunately to blame. They stimulate the desire to duplicate remarkable interiors and offer innumerable inspirations and ideas. Designing a residential property for the first time or renovating it with customized furniture also seems great.

According to the modern-day Cape Town interior decorators, the interior design courses give projects to the students where they have to modify a tiny space to lavish abode with custom furniture. Refurbishing older pieces or creating pieces tailored to varying requirements; do not restrict imagination.

It might sound like a big task but it can be accomplished through the below-mentioned tips.

1. Plan and Research Properly- Before a person starts rearranging and purchasing new stuff, he/she must check out the concepts, themes, and trends and save all the pictures and reference materials to depend on during the implementation stage. Categorize whatever collected in a systematic plan. If a person starts working on the house one fine day without any prior research, he/she will end up inside a chaotic dump.

2. Try in Smaller Spaces- One may be bursting with innovative ideas to remodel their house, but, most interior designers suggest them to first take up a small project, and see how much effort and time are required to transform a full house. The design courses offer theme-based assignments to the students to experiment and then come up with great solutions.

3. Opt for Imported Furniture and Relics- When traveling to foreign destinations and during the visit to flea markets, please look out for fascinating furniture pieces that can add a different sort of definition to the house. Importing furniturefrom abroad is not at all difficult as multiple dealers out there are eager to handle the shipping and deliveries.

4. Never Rush the Process- Designing a house may seem easy, but in actuality, it is an exhausting endeavor. One needs to be patient and not rush the process. To finish executing the design, several people may end up wasting a lot of money and commit mistakes too. Being cautious at every stage seems like the best way to move forward.

5. Talk to Local Artists- If one is bored to death by similar types of concepts and designs found online or in the well-known stores, they need to talk to the artists in their locality to create a customized piece. Whether it is a cabinet to keep all the liquor or a stylish ottoman, everybody likes having something that no one else has.

The students of the interior design courses are motivated to socialize with the local artists as their creativity can support them in formulating brand-new and visually appealing plans.

6. Visit Exhibitions and Trade Shows- According to the best house decorators, the events such as furniture exhibitions and trade shows can allow one to stay updated with different interior products. They are also an excellent source of connections. One could meet dealers here who can materialize even the most complicated furniture designs.

Incorporating custom furniture to the interior spaces can be an extremely fascinating project. Just like the students of the contemporary designing courses, one will be able to learn the various skills to help them in turning a boring house into a comfortable as well as aesthetic dwelling.

Interior designers spend a significant portion of their life researching the tiny details that make a space perfect. Like an amazingly directed movie, a house decorated well enough is engaging, familiar, safe, and impressive.

Sometimes, people fail to identify what is not so likeable about a living room. The following write-up sheds light on a few common living room design mistakes plaguing it to a great extent. Please check them out right now.

Planning the Layout Inappropriately

Although it may be tempting to push the sofa against the wall that faces the television, you must be more involved to plan the living room layout. It requires the creation of the conversion groupings, especially when the room is narrow and long, just like the lofts and the townhouses.

Having an Excessively Small Rug

One of the chief offenders in a living room decorates it with a tiny rug. The huge rugs might seem intimidating and expensive, but most proficient stylists said it is believed to be one of the significant aspects of the living room. A rug too small will destroy the entire outlook.

Choose the Wrong Sofa

Even from other places, renowned interior decorators in South Africa said an excellent living room depends on a great sofa. Besides contributing to the comfort quotient, it also determines how a room feels and looks.

Remember, purchasing on impulse is a good idea for small accessories and side tables, but do not use such a strategy for a sofa. A substantial amount of your hard-earned money will simply go down the drain.

Installing an Unequal Coffee Table

According to a reputed interior designer, there is so much more to selecting a coffee table than visiting your favourite home improvement store and getting one on a whim. Allow your lifestyle to guide you to decide on the height, length, materials, and clearance space needed to ensure a coffee table harmonizes with the entire living room. Keep the size of the concerned space in mind as well.

Dangling Artworks Imperfectly

Watching an artwork hung incorrectly on the wall is like watching a movie character with a really bad wig. It is hard to let go, and you feel like ripping it off right away because you feel everything will get better once you do so. Even though poorly placed artworks do not ruin the experience of your overall properly, but it is outright distracting and a hindrance to a great first impression.

Besides those specified above, forgetting about the investment pieces is another big blunder that several people admitted to committing. Even though it may seem counterintuitive at first, purchasing one statement accent is much better, financially speaking, that relocating numerous inexpensive pieces. The efficient and experienced interior decorators in South Africa said that the little things, which seem harmless, cost as much, and the space feels cluttered, not cohesive.

Your bathroom must be more than just a place to take a shower. It must be a sort of sanctuary that helps you unwind.

A few years ago, having a master bath was considered a luxury, but now, given the hectic schedule of larger segments of the population, it is slowing turning into a necessity. Thanks to modern technology, enjoying a spa-like experience from a bathroom has become easier.

Whether planning on remodeling or building a house from the scratch, mentioned below are six features your bathroom must-have. Please check them out right now.

1. LED Vanity Light System

Owing to consuming much less energy, thus, keeping the electricity bills low, the LED lights have managed to acquire extensive recognition. Some interior decorators and designers build vanity with adjustable LED lighting system. So, you can say goodbye to the unflattering angles and harsh shadows forever.

2. Double Sinks

Being in love does not mean you have to share everything. If both you and your partner have to go out each morning at the same time, it is just practical to invest in double sinks. Why wait for your beloved to finish their skin care regimen and be late, right? Get abundant counter space too.

3. Touch Less Faucet

A well-known interior designer said most of the contemporary manufacturers are delivering touch less faucets for residential properties and not only public restrooms. Now isn’t that great? This feature is especially ideal in the current pandemic situation. Some faucets come with soap dispensers too.

4. Steam Shower or Sauna

A steam shower or sauna allows your bathroom to look like a high-end spa parlor, but the cost of installation is lesser than you can imagine. If for two people, it thankfully does not take up a lot of space. Just imagine how soothing it would be to spend time in the bathroom during the winter season.

5. Soaking Tub

While you certainly relish open showers, sometimes all you want to is submerged in the water. A perfect master bathroom has a soaking tub with enough space on the edges to keep aromatherapy candles, a book, your laptop etc. Purchase some luscious bath bombs and pamper yourself once or twice a week.

6. Walk In Closet

Your morning routine needs to be seamless, so, connecting the walk-in closet with the master bathroom seems viable. Depending on the space, you may build a closet with one entrance from a hallway or two entrances on both ends. Some designers can customize the closet as per your requirements and expectations.

Although not compulsory, according to a renowned interior designer, the individuals love an in-built television in their master bathroom. Now do not just hang a flat-screen in the far corner. You may implant the TV into the mirror so that it remains hidden when turned off or disguise it as any other architectural element.

The ten features specified above will help you have the best bathroom and promote relaxation after a long tiring day at work.

1. Ghost is designed for ambitious, professional publishers who want to actively build a business around their content. That's who it works best for.
2. The entire platform can be modified and customised to suit your needs. It's very powerful, but does require some knowledge of code. Ghost is not necessarily a good platform for beginners or people who just want a simple personal blog.
3. It's possible to work with all your favourite tools and apps with hundreds of integrations to speed up your workflows, connect email lists, build communities and much more.

Behind the scenes

Ghost is made by an independent non-profit organisation called the Ghost Foundation. We are 100% self funded by revenue from our Ghost(Pro) service, and every penny we make is re-invested into funding further development of free, open source technology for modern publishing.

The version of Ghost you are looking at right now would not have been made possible without generous contributions from the open source community.

Next up, the editor

The main thing you'll want to read about next is probably: the Ghost editor. This is where the good stuff happens.

By the way, once you're done reading, you can simply delete the default Ghost user from your team to remove all of these introductory posts!

Ghost has a powerful visual editor with familiar formatting options, as well as the ability to add dynamic content.

Select your text to add formatting such as headers or to create links. Or use Markdown shortcuts to do the work for you - if that's your thing.

Rich editing at your fingertips

The editor can also handle rich media objects, called cards, which can be organised and re-ordered using drag and drop.

You can insert a card either by clicking the  +  button, or typing  /  on a new line to search for a particular card. This allows you to efficiently insert images, markdown, html, embeds and more.

For example:

• Insert a video from YouTube directly by pasting the URL
• Create unique content like buttons or forms using the HTML card
• Need to share some code? Embed code blocks directly

<header class="site-header outer">
    <div class="inner">
        {{> "site-nav"}}
    </div>
</header>

It's also possible to share links from across the web in a visual way using bookmark cards that automatically render information from a websites meta data. Paste any URL to try it out:

Ghost: The #1 open source headless Node.js CMS

The world’s most popular modern open source publishing platform. A headless Node.js CMS used by Apple, Sky News, Tinder and thousands more. MIT licensed, with 30k+ stars on Github.

Ghost

Working with images in posts

You can add images to your posts in many ways:

• Upload from your computer
• Click and drag an image into the browser
• Paste directly into the editor from your clipboard
• Insert using a URL

Image sizes

Once inserted you can blend images beautifully into your content at different sizes and add captions and alt tags wherever needed.

Image galleries

Tell visual stories using the gallery card to add up to 9 images that will display as a responsive image gallery:

Image optimisation

Ghost will automatically resize and optimise your images with lossless compression. Your posts will be fully optimised for the web without any extra effort on your part.

Next: Publishing Options

Once your post is looking good, you'll want to use the publishing options to ensure it gets distributed in the right places, with custom meta data, feature images and more.

Access the post settings menu by clicking the settings icon in the top right hand corner of the editor and discover everything you need to get your content ready for publishing. This is where you can edit things like tags, post URL, publish date and custom meta data.

Feature images, URL & excerpts

Insert your post feature image from the very top of the post settings menu. Consider resizing or optimising your image first to ensure it's an appropriate size. Below this, you can set your post URL, publish date and add a custom excerpt.

Tags & authors

You can easily add multiple tags and authors to any post to filter and organise the relationships between your content in Ghost.

Structured data & SEO

There's no need to hard code your meta data. In fact, Ghost will generate default meta data automatically using the content in your post.

Alternatively, you can override this by adding a custom meta title and description, as well as unique information for social media sharing cards on Facebook and Twitter.

It's also possible to set custom canonicals, which is useful for guest posts or curated lists of external links.

Ghost will automatically implement structured data for your publication using JSON-LD to further optimise your content.

{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "Article",
    "publisher": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Publishing options",
        "logo": "https://static.ghost.org/ghost-logo.svg"
    },
    "author": {
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Ghost",
        "url": "http://demo.ghost.io/author/ghost/",
        "sameAs": []
    },
    "headline": "Publishing options",
    "url": "http://demo.ghost.io/publishing-options",
    "datePublished": "2018-08-08T11:44:00.000Z",
    "dateModified": "2018-08-09T12:06:21.000Z",
    "keywords": "Getting Started",
    "description": "The Ghost editor has everything you need to fully optimise your content. This is where you can add tags and authors, feature a post, or turn a post into a page."
}
    

You can test that the structured data schema on your site is working as it should using Google’s structured data tool.

Code injection

This tool allows you to inject code on a per post or page basis, or across your entire site. This means you can modify CSS, add unique tracking codes, or add other scripts to the head or foot of your publication without making edits to your theme files.

To add code site-wide, use the code injection tool in the main admin menu. This is useful for adding a Google Analytics tracking code, or to start tracking with any other analytics tool.

To add code to a post or page, use the code injection tool within the post settings menu. This is useful if you want to add art direction, scripts or styles that are only applicable to one post or page.

Next: Admin settings

Now you understand how to create and optimise content, let's explore some admin settings so you can invite your team and start collaborating.

If you've got a publication that you don't want the world to see yet because it's not ready to launch, you can hide your Ghost site behind a basic shared pass-phrase.

You can toggle this preference on at the bottom of Ghost's General Settings:

Ghost will give you a short, randomly generated pass-phrase which you can share with anyone who needs access to the site while you're working on it. While this setting is enabled, all search engine optimisation features will be switched off to help keep your site under the radar.

Do remember though, this is not secure authentication. You shouldn't rely on this feature for protecting important private data. It's just a simple, shared pass-phrase for some very basic privacy.

Invite your team

Ghost has a number of different user roles for your team:

Contributors
This is the base user level in Ghost. Contributors can create and edit their own draft posts, but they are unable to edit drafts of others or publish posts. Contributors are untrusted users with the most basic access to your publication.

Authors
Authors are the 2nd user level in Ghost. Authors can write, edit  and publish their own posts. Authors are trusted users. If you don't trust users to be allowed to publish their own posts, they should be set as Contributors.

Editors
Editors are the 3rd user level in Ghost. Editors can do everything that an Author can do, but they can also edit and publish the posts of others - as well as their own. Editors can also invite new Contributors & Authors to the site.

Administrators
The top user level in Ghost is Administrator. Again, administrators can do everything that Authors and Editors can do, but they can also edit all site settings and data, not just content. Additionally, administrators have full access to invite, manage or remove any other user of the site.

The Owner
There is only ever one owner of a Ghost site. The owner is a special user which has all the same permissions as an Administrator, but with two exceptions: The Owner can never be deleted. And in some circumstances the owner will have access to additional special settings if applicable. For example: billing details, if using Ghost(Pro).

It's a good idea to ask all of your users to fill out their user profiles, including bio and social links. These will populate rich structured data for posts and generally create more opportunities for themes to fully populate their design.

Next: Organising content

Find out how to organise your content with sensible tags and authors, or for more advanced configurations, how to create custom content structures using dynamic routing.

You can think of tags like Gmail labels. By tagging posts with one or more keyword, you can organise articles into buckets of related content.

When you create content for your publication you can assign tags to help differentiate between categories of content.

For example you may tag some content with News and other content with Podcast, which would create two distinct categories of content listed on /tag/news/ and /tag/podcast/, respectively.

If you tag a post with both News and Podcast - then it appears in both sections. Tag archives are like dedicated home-pages for each category of content that you have. They have their own pages, their own RSS feeds, and can support their own cover images and meta data.

The primary tag

Inside the Ghost editor, you can drag and drop tags into a specific order. The first tag in the list is always given the most importance, and some themes will only display the primary tag (the first tag in the list) by default.

News, Technology, Startup

So you can add the most important tag which you want to show up in your theme, but also add related tags which are less important.

Private tags

Sometimes you may want to assign a post a specific tag, but you don't necessarily want that tag appearing in the theme or creating an archive page. In Ghost, hashtags are private and can be used for special styling.

For example, if you sometimes publish posts with video content - you might want your theme to adapt and get rid of the sidebar for these posts, to give more space for an embedded video to fill the screen. In this case, you could use private tags to tell your theme what to do.

News, #video

Here, the theme would assign the post publicly displayed tags of News - but it would also keep a private record of the post being tagged with #video. In your theme, you could then look for private tags conditionally and give them special formatting.

You can find documentation for theme development techniques like this and many more over on Ghost's extensive theme docs.

Dynamic routing

Dynamic routing gives you the ultimate freedom to build a custom publication to suit your needs. Routes are rules that map URL patterns to your content and templates.

You may not want content tagged with News to exist on: example.com/tag/news. Instead, you want it to exist on example.com/news .

In this case you can use dynamic routes to create customised collections of content on your site. It's also possible to use multiple templates in your theme to render each content type differently.

There are lots of use cases for dynamic routing with Ghost, here are a few common examples:

• Setting a custom home page with its own template
• Having separate content hubs for blog and podcast, that render differently, and have custom RSS feeds to support two types of content
• Creating a founders column as a unique view, by filtering content created by specific authors
• Including dates in permalinks for your posts
• Setting posts to have a URL relative to their primary tag like example.com/europe/story-title/
  

Dynamic routing can be configured in Ghost using YAML files. Read our dynamic routing documentation for further details.

Next: Apps & Integrations

Work with all your favourite apps and tools using our integrations, or create your own custom integrations with webhooks.

It's possible to connect your Ghost site to hundreds of the most popular apps and tools using integrations that take no more than a few minutes to setup.

Whether you need to automate workflows, connect your email list, build a community or embed products from your ecommerce store, our integrations library has got it all covered with hundreds of tutorials.

Zapier

On top of this, you can connect your Ghost site to more than 1,000 external services using the official integration with Zapier.

Zapier sets up automations with Triggers and Actions, which allows you to create and customise a wide range of connected applications.

Example: When someone new subscribes to a newsletter on a Ghost site (Trigger) then the contact information is automatically pushed into MailChimp (Action).

Here are the most popular Ghost<>Zapier automation templates:

Custom integrations

At the heart of Ghost sits a robust JSON API – designed to create, manage and retrieve content with ease.

It's possible to create custom Ghost integrations with dedicated API keys and webhooks from the Integrations page within Ghost Admin.

Beyond that, the API allows you to build entirely custom publishing apps. You can send content from your favourite desktop editor, build a custom interface for handling editorial workflow or use Ghost as a full headless CMS with a custom front-end.

The Ghost API is thoroughly documented and straightforward to work with for developers of almost any level.

Final step: Themes

Alright, on to the last post in our welcome-series! If you're curious about creating your own Ghost theme from scratch, find out how that works.

Ghost comes with a default theme called Casper, which is designed to be a clean, readable publication layout and can be easily adapted for most purposes.

If you need something a little more customised, it's entirely possible to build on top of existing open source themes, or to build your own from scratch. Rather than giving you a few basic settings which act as a poor proxy for code, we just let you write code.

Marketplace

There are a huge range of both free and premium pre-built themes which you can download from the Ghost Theme Marketplace:

Theme development

Ghost themes are written with a templating language called handlebars, which has a set of dynamic helpers to insert your data into template files. For example: {{author.name}} outputs the name of the current author.

The best way to learn how to write your own Ghost theme is to have a look at the source code for Casper, which is heavily commented and should give you a sense of how everything fits together.

• default.hbs is the main template file, all contexts will load inside this file unless specifically told to use a different template.
• post.hbs is the file used in the context of viewing a post.
• index.hbs is the file used in the context of viewing the home page.
• and so on

We've got full and extensive theme documentation which outlines every template file, context and helper that you can use. You can also get started with our useful starter theme, which includes the most common foundations and components required to build your own theme.

If you want to chat with other people making Ghost themes to get any advice or help, there's also a themes section on our public Ghost forum.