Travel the Home Exchange Way: Small Business Blog of the Day

I received a nice comment from the UK today about a woman who has been running her business for 21 years, and has been blogging about it for two. She requested that I check out her site, and I was quite surprised at what a great job she has done with it.

Her business is in helping people exchange homes. That's where you swap your home with someone else so you can both vacation without hotel expenses. Sounds like a new TV show to me.

What it is
Travel the Home Exchange Way is the blog for Home Base Holidays, a company that networks homeowners together so they can swap houses for vacations. The blog is written by Lois Sealey who runs Home Base Holidays from her office in North London.

Features
Examples of clients who have had home-swapping experiences, travel advice, and all sorts of tips for homeowners who might consider trading their home for a week (or month) with another family's.

Favorite Post
Exchange Homes to the 'Coolest Capital in the World' is a post about one of Home Base Holidays' listings. This particular client claims to live in the 'Coolest Capital' and you have to wonder where that is?

"Now where could that be? Several cities (Paris? London? Rome?) might make claims to being the 'coolest capital' in the world..." Read the post to find out where the 'Coolest Capital' is.

Further Comments
This is really an excellent blog. Lois has clearly spent a lot of time working on it, producing an outstanding quantity and quality of posts in a short period of time. There are several photos and graphics on the site, which is great. She uses the technique of having small graphics in the posts that are thumbnails to the larger version of the graphic. We saw this last week with the Sweet Riot blog as well. I'm on the fence whether I prefer the thumbnail approach, or just having a larger photo in the post. Large photos eat up bandwidth, but make a very strong impression in blog posts. As you may have noticed, I prefer having the larger photo on this website. This is such a nit picky thing to even mention, which goes to show how great Lois' blog is.

Tags: house swapping | home swapping | home base holidays | travel the home exchange way | Lois Sealey

Comments

[Home Base Holidays]

Hi Brian

I am really chuffed (as they say here) that, the day after suggesting you have a look at my blog, you chose it as your Small Business Blog of the Day! Thank you for your very nice comments (I will in turn be directing my blog visitors to Pajama Market) and your suggestion re using larger format photos (guess I have just been a little cautious and I agree that larger photos can be more striking).

Cheers,
Lois

[Brian Brown]

No beauracracy here. If you'll notice, I actually used the thumbnail approach today on the Sweet Riot interview, so I definitely think this approach has its place.

Happy blogging.