Mary Lockman Methow Valley Real Estate

Majestic Skyline Lodge

• 6,460 sq. ft., 4 bath, 4 bdrm 1 1/2 story - MLS® $695,000 - Mazama Mountain Panoramas

Twin Lakes, Winthrop  -  Luxurious unmatched panoramas of the gorgeous Methow Valley, Methow River and surrounding Mountains. This skyline lodge sits perched above the town of Winthrop with massive view windows showcasing the majestic mountains of Mazama. Cathedral ceilings frame the compelling views with many unique interior features including stand alone propane fireplace, custom trim throughout, and radiant heat in the lower level. Open floor plans on both levels with two master bedroom suites. MVSTA Ski trails very close to this property. Community Pool and easy year round access.

Property information

For Methow Valley Real Estate Buyers and Sellers who are in the market today, it is a very good idea to check out the latest information on the extended home buyer tax credit. Working with your real estate tax expert, you may be able to take advantage of this opportunity while interest rates are still low.

In addition to the Extended Home Buyer Tax Credit there is a website for Washington State Home Owners and Buyers. This is a great resource at http://wahomeowners.com/

Here is the link to this video regarding the new tax extension for Buyers and Sellers in Methow Valley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyB72M0ae4I&feature=player_embedded

Mary Lockman is a realtor with John L. Scott Methow Valley. Feel free to email Mary at Mary Lockman or visit her websites at http://www.methowrealestateservices.com/ or http://www.methowearth.com/

Here is the third and final Part Three of my Introduction to HTML

Check out Lesson 1 at http://activerain.com/blogsview/1298501/introduction-to-html-and-task-1-create-a-simple-web-page-in-5-minutes

Check out Lesson 2 at http://activerain.com/blogsview/1300690/introduction-to-html-part-two-create-a-simple-web-page-in-5-minutes-or-less

This third lesson disscusses an introduction to Images, and coming soon I will do a lesson on anchor tags and hyper links

This lesson assumes you understand file management, that is when you save a file on your computer you know how and where you stored it.  (Coming soon, how to save and retreve files on your computer.)

Images:

There are currently only three file formats or picture types that a Web browser can interpret, these are:

    GIF files, all picture files with the extension ".gif"

    JPG files, all picture files with the extension ".jpg"

    PNG files, all picture files with the extension ".png"

Two of these formats, that is gif and jpg are very common, but you will find and can also use files with the extension png.  Older browsers do not support png files. These, will not be able to show picture files in png format.

GIF and JPEG Images are very popular because:

1. They will work across platforms ( any computer and operating system).

2. Web browsers will be able to display images in GIF and JPEG formats on their web pages.

3. They compress the size of the image file. The size of your image is not directly related to the size of its file.  The file size is related to the "depth" which basically means how much detail is in the picture and how many different colors are included. 

Remember:

*small image file = *quick download time = *happier visitors

 GIF means Graphics Interchange Format. We use GIF's when not more then 256 colors are required.  Therefore, they do not work well for photographs. GIF's are commonly used for simple line drawings, logo's and graphics. A later version of the GIF format GIF89A developed two years after the 87 GIF includes several enhancement featuresthat are not available in JPEG.

One enhancement feature is transparency, which allows you to blend your background with the picture you are working with, and lets you remove the picture's original background. EX: a picture of me against a white wall on a web page with a purple background would be enhanced by the transparency feature which would remove the white wall background on the original picture and you would only see me against the purple of the web page.

lnterlacing is another feature of GIF89A which has the picture download as very blurry at first and then gradually grows more focused through the download process. The old format will only download a picture from top to bottom line by line one row of picture at a time.

 The third and most popular feature for GIF89A is animation. GIF89A files can contain many images and when dialed in by the browser they appear in sequence. You simply put the name of your animation file in the appropriate location for an image file in the image tag and the browser executes the file beautifully. The trick is to know how to sequence your images for effective animation.

Additional URL's for many animated GIF collections and pointers to GIF animation construction sets are listed on http://www.1stsitefree.com/graphics.htm

JPEGmeans Joint Photographic Experts Group named after the engineering standards committee that defined it. JPEG's can represent the full 16.7 million colors available, which makes them ideal for photographs and other High color pictures! However JPEG will not have GIF89a enhancement features.

 Image maps are also used in web pages. When one image links to many web pages we create a map file associated with the image which will designate which regions of the Image will specifically allow us to link to what sites, with any undefined regions going to a default link.

 You may add images to your page, located on some distant computer on the Internet or you may want to make use of your own artwork (more likely!).  For this particular purpose, always locate your masterpieces within the same folder as your HTML web document.

 To insert an image onto your page you would have to make use of the <IMG> tag. This tag has a number of properties (additional information) of which we will review a couple. Consider the following <IMG> tag:

             <IMG SRC="image_file.jpg" BORDER=0>

  *Note that the <IMG> tag is one of those tags that does not come in pairs.

Also notice that the first <IMG> tag attribute shown here is the "SRC" or Source attribute. SRC tells the browser where to look for your image. SRC is just the file name of your image, if your image is in the same folder as your HTML document, or, SRC can be the exactInternet address of where the image is found on the net. There are many host servers and you must store your images on the site and then direct your webpage SRC to the correct location of your image.  Recently I accidently moved the Image folderto a different location on one of my sites and all the images were gone.  Luckily I located where I had unknowingly moved the Image folder for my images so the host server could find those pictures and know where to display them on the site.  Most Web sites are constructed with a main index page that has the images stored in an image folder, and all the SRC tag attributes on the site must direct that browser to go to the Image folder.  This would be accomplished in the example above as follows:

<IMG SRC="Images/image_file.jpg" BORDER=0> (This is telling the web browser to load an image located one directory up from the Indexed page in the folder named Images, on the host server and with a file name of image_file.jpg

 The other attribute shown in the example above is the "BORDER" attribute. Using the Border attribute we can create a frame around an image. In order to create a thin frame we would set border=1, for a slightly thicker frame I would set border=2 and so forth.  Set border=0 not to display any frame around my image.

Note with CSS you would be able to create a wider variety of border features and more options in image placement on your pages.

Continuing on with this project, Steps 1-12 are located in Lesson 1 and Lesson 2

•13.    Create a new folder called Web stuff on your desktop

Step 1. Right click the mouse in the white space of the Window in which you wish to create this folder.

                Step 2. Select the New and then Folder commands to display this  shortcut menu.

            Step 3. Key the name of your folder Web stuff

•14.    Right Click on the image below, choose the Save Picture As... command and save this picture as goat.jpg IN THE Web stuffFolder on your destop. 

•15.   Create a copy of the web template text file (with the four basic container tags from lesson 1 and notepad icon) name this file "add image". and also save this to the same folder Web stuff

•16.    Open add image.txt  (text file) and insert <img src="goat.jpg" border="0"> between the body tags on your page.  Once again save this file as "Examples of add image.html".  Open the html file to view your image.

Let's see what happens to our image when we add some common attributes to the Image tag.

The basic image tag <IMG SRC="goat.jpg"> can have many attributes nested with it such as vspace and hspace. These allow you to allot a region of space around your image (v representing the vertical and h the horizontal).

 *17.  Open the text file "add image".  Locate your image tag and add the following html exactly as shown:

<IMG SRC="goat.jpg" boder="0" hspace="20" vspace="20">

Once again save your file as html and view the changes to your graphic image.

The numbers in quotes use pixels for their unit of measurement.  A pixel is short for picture element and refers to the dots that make up the screen image.

(So one pixel is very small.)

Another attributefor the IMG tag is align; this will determine how the text on your page will align to your image.

•18.    Edit the Image tag in your text file so that the following changes are made exactly as shown:

<IMG SRC="goat.jpg" align="right" hspace="20" vspace="20" border="5">

 View the changes made to your mountain goat photo by resaving the file as html and opening this file.  Notice how your text now aligns to the right of your image and puts the image under the left margin.

What will the align="left" attribute do?

You can frame your picture with a border using the border attribute as follows:

<IMG SRC="goat.jpg" border="5">

This will place a narrow frame around the image.  (Again the border is in pixels.)

If you want to provide an alternative to your image for those not able or wanting to view images you can provide an alt attribute.  This will show text for text only browsers.

Example<IMG SRC="goat.jpg" alt="Mountain Goat in Winthrop Washington">

Tips to speed up the image download time:

Recall that the length of time it takes to download a published web page on the net is critical. By adding the height and width attributes your browser will not try to measure your images and then down load text, you have done the work for them so include the height and width of your image in the IMG tag for speedy downloading times.

EX: <IMG src="goat.jpg" height="206 width="300">

By adding LOWSRC attributeto the IMG tag we can specify a lower resolution picture to download first which allows the browser to quickly load a picture of low resolution. After the page is fully loaded and formatted then and only then does the more detailed image develop.

Now that you have learned the basic HTML concepts here is a summary of important key points:

There are four main container tags that must be used in every HTML web document.  We have created a template (in lesson one) that can be used over and over for the fun learning process of adding new components to your page.

To see other pages HTML simply go to View on the File Menu and then select Source command to see other website HTML.  By seeing how other sites are created you will quickly learn much more HTML. 

There are numerous Websites that provide lessons on HTML.  Visit many of them to see which sites are teaching you in a mannor that equates to your specific learning style.

For Advanced Web Designers there are a host of Free online resources.  Stay tuned for future blogs on HTML and I can show you some great spots to visit.

MaryLockman is a realtor with John L. Scott Methow Valley..

Email Mary or visit her website at www.methowrealestateservices.com(created in notepad) for the most comprehensive and best Methow Valley real estate online resource.

Here is Part one of 3 about how to write a simple web page using notepad or any text editor on your computer.

Let's create a very simple Web Page to help make this clearer:

 Introduction to Web Publishing

We will create a simple Web Page in Notepadin this project, but first a little background information about the language of the web HTML will be presented.  Note if you do not have notepad on your computer any text editor (file extension "txt") will work.

 HTML, SGML and Formatting Languages:

What is HTML?

 The Hypertext Markup Language (or HTML) is the language used to create the documents for the World Wide Web. Although most browsers will display any document that is written in plain text, there are advantages that you get by writing documents using HTML. When HTML documents are read by applications specifically designed for the Web (usually called browsers or Web browsers) they can include formatting, graphics, and even links to other documents.

 As a markup language, HTML is not so much concerned about the appearance of the documents, but about the structure of a document. Rich Text Format (RTF) and Postscript, on the other hand, are examples of formatting languages. Formatting languages are concerned more with the appearance of the document (typefaces and the exact position of illustrations, for example). A markup language is used more to describe the structure of the document. For example, you use HTML to mark the headings, normal paragraphs, lists (and whether they are numbered or not), and even things like addresses. (Today CSS has become a very popular formatting tool in the design of websites.  To learn more visit http://www.w3schools.com/css/#)

HTML is a relatively simple implementation of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).  SGML encompasses several types of markup languages called Document Type Definitions (DTD). HTML is simple enough to just type in directly without using some sort of HTML editor. HTML editors are useful, especially if you have massive quantities of documents to write, but they are not necessary to get started. A text editor such as Notepad is a fine place to begin.  FREE WYSIWYG software is available today for very fast web design.  Wysiwyg means what you see is what you get and pronounced wizziewig, here you can find some popular free sites: http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmleditors/tp/aatpfreewyswin.htm (XML is useful to mention here under this family, HTML displays information on the web and XML is a way of storing data on the web. So if you have a database of info that needs to go on the web you may incorporate XML into your site. For example large employers with online employee logins will probably have XML help them to execute the data online.

In general, HTML commands begin with a < and end with a >. The commands are almost never case sensitive and are either "container" or "separator" commands (although there are numerous exceptions to both of those generalizations). A container command has a beginning command and an ending command. The commands would thus be applied to the text in-between the beginning and ending commands. We will see examples of these commands in our project.

 White space, meaning anything that is not a printable character, is generally ignored in HTML.  Leaving a blank line in your document will generally not create a blank line when the document is displayed in an Internet browser. 

The designers of HTML were concerned with conveying the structure of documents in a simple, portable way. The advantage of this approach is that users on any kind of system, from a Macintosh to a PC can view documents formatted with HTML with relatively little loss of information. Another advantage of HTML is that it is such a simple language it can be quickly learned by just about anyone who is interested in learning more about web pages.

Let's begin to create some html documents,  for PC you will need to open notepad, go to your start button/All Programs/Accessories/Notepad

1.  Open Notepad and key the following exactly as shown:

 <html>

<head>

<title>

</title>

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

 Remember to hit the enter key after each entry. Save this file as WebpageTemplate.  We can than use this file as a template for other Web Pages:

Save the existing file WebpageTemplate as a new file called My First Web Page. (Go to the File menu and select Save As...)

 These are the four container tags included in every HTML document.

Every HTML document should start by declaring itself as such.  The "<html>" tag at the very top of the document achieves this. The very last text in a document should be the "</html>" tag.

 The top part of the document should also have a section for heading information which is surrounded by the <head> and </head> commands. There are several items of information that you can put in the header.  One piece of information you should always have in the heading is the title. The title is surrounded by the <title> and </title> commands.

 The title of a document is not normally displayed as part of the page, but is often displayed in some sort of special section in most browsers (Mosaic puts the title in a Document Title box just under it's menu. Netscape puts the title on the Title Bar, for example). The title should be both descriptive and short enough to fit comfortably on one line. (another very important family of tags that we nest in the header section and thus will not be displayed in the browser window, are the META Tags.  These tags are very important for Search Engine Optimization, SEO)

 The "body" of the document should also be marked off with the <body> and </body> commands. This is the part of the document that is normally displayed as the page in most browsers.

 Let's create a very simple Web Page to help make this clearer:

 2.  Open the file My First Web Page:

In between the <title> </title> tags key "Great Links for New Web Publishers."

In between the <body> </body> tags key "Here are some great links for new Web Publishers."  If you have typed this correctly it should appear in Notepad exactly as shown here:

<html>

<head>

<title>Great Links for New Web Publishers

</title>

</head>

<body>Here are some great links for new Web Publishers.

</body>

</html>

3.  Select Save Asfrom the File Menu.  We will now save our File as an html document by naming the file My First Web Page.htmlThis creates an html file that corresponds to the existing text file My First Web Page.txt.  Make sure you know where you have saved this file on your computer.  Hint use your desktop if you are not clear about how to find files you have saved on your computer.

Close all open files in Notepad.

Go to My Computer and locate the file My First Web Page.html

 Notice how the html file you just created has the icon of your default Web Browser.   Default means what Internet Browser your computer will use automatically when you try to access the World Wide Web.  Popular browsers today are Foxfire, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari and Opera.                      

4.  To view your Web Page, simply Double Clickon the html file you previously created in # 3.

If all has gone as planned here you will see your Internet Browser open a window that says "Here are some great links for new Web Publishers."  Now wasn't that easy and fun?

To see how all web pages are created go to the file menu bar on your browser, choose view and and select source.  Do this for several sites you pull up on the web and you can start to see how web pages are put together.

Stay tuned for more lessons on web page creation.

Mary Lockman is a realtor with John L. Scott Methow Valley providing real estate services for Winthrop homes and land, Mazama homes and land and all the Methow Valley real estate.

Visit www.methowrealestateservices.com (created in notepad from a template) to find specific searches for Mazama homes, Mazama land, Winthrop homes, Winthrop land, Wolf Creek homes, Wolf Creek land and all the properties in Methow Valley, Washington broken out by communities, homes and land for your searching convenience.

With the losses suffered by many in the stock market over the last year some investors are seeking a broader range of assets to invest in.  The Self Directed Individual Retirement Account (when executed according to the IRS rules and regulations) is an option that will allow investors to purchase real estate using this special retirement account.  By working with qualified professionals conversion from existing retirement accounts is an option to explore as well.

 The Self Directed Individual Retirement Account commonly known as the Self Directed IRA is an IRA in which the owner of the account makes the decisions for the investing strategies.  Similar to the 1031 Exchange, real estate investors must get qualified professionals to help give advice and set up a Self Directed IRA (ensuring compliance with the IRS tax code.) 

 Typically there is a custodian who can assist their clients in the various processes that must be followed so they know they are following the rules and regulations of the IRS. Conversion from more traditional IRA's is possible but only in working with the people who are qualified to help you handle your accounts correctly.

Not only does the Self Directed IRA allow investors to diversify their retirement accounts with a far broader range of asset types including real estate, but it can provide even more options because the real estate might only have a percentage of it under the self directed IRA.  

By using a blend of funding sources, the real estate investor might increase their investment holdings because more funds are available to them and they might be able to utilize a property in a more flexible parameter where only the percentage of the asset under the IRA is dictated by those IRS guidelines.  This is only a glimpse into the many options available to investors.  To ensure complete compliance using this investment tool with the IRS (and thus no headaches down the road) it is critical to get consultation with qualified professionals in this field.  Further this option may or may not be a good fit for an investor and so consultation with a very good and highly trusted professional in this field will help you determine if this investment vehicle is right for you.

Most custodians for Self Directed IRA's are more than willing to sit down with you to discuss how and what your options are utilizing these strategies.  Most qualified custodians offer  introductory consultations to explore this option at no cost to you.  For interested Buyers and Sellers of real estate in Methow Valley including Mazama, Winthrop, Twisp, and Carlton Washington, the nearest professional services for Self Directed IRA's is located in Chelan, WA.  Entrust offers webinars and seminars all around our local area.  They also encourage you to make an appointment to discuss the options available to you personally.  There are other offices and companies in Seattle as well that offer similiar services such as Guidant Financial with a website at http://www.guidantfinancial.com/

Great Mountain views

• 1,344 sq. ft., 2 bath, 2 bdrm single story - MLS® $279,000 - Immaculate

Carlton, Okanogan County  -  Like New Immaculate 2 bedroom 2 full bath Custom Home. Spectacular scenary of the Chelan Sawtooth Jagged Peaks, eastern mountains of the North Cascades with scattered pine forests and valley views too. Easy care home and low maintenance delightful landscaping. Sprinkler system is in, heat pump to keep the home warm in winter and cool in summer. Carport, and outbuilding, Wrap around deck to enjoy the lovey landscape too. Home includes a utility room, family room, open floor plan, vaulted ceiling, custom tile and woodwork throughout, and much more. Super easy access all year long, just minutes to the sleepy Town of Carlton, the best swimming hole on the Methow River, and world class recreation. Incluedes American Home Sheild Warranty for FlexPlan Combo. All this and more for a great value of $279,000.

Property information

Winthrop, Okanogan County  -  The 1 1/2 story at 8 Aspen Heights Rd. has been sold.

Property information