Simon Hill

Simon Hill started out as a consultant in web sociology, user behaviour and interaction design, with a passionate interest in high-end interior design. The concept of furnish.co.uk was conceived by his wife Lisa back in 2005, after they had spent a frustrating three years trying to source great products for their newly renovated home.

Furnish takes the hard work out of shopping for your home by bringing you the best and most stylish furnishings from across the web. It's your very own home interiors personal shopper. Shop across the finest home furnishing designers and stores, get inspired by delicious interiors and ideas from our magazine, and network with like-minded interiors addicts.

When Simon is not working, he can be found spending time with his wife and son, listening to Rufus Wainwright, eating Marmite and sleeping.

SIMON'S FAVOURITE WEBSITES

SAYNOTO0870.COM - It drives me crazy when I want to contact a company and I'm forced to pay a premium rate for their customer service phone line, especially when I'm phoning to complain. With SAYNOTO0870, you can type in a premium rate phone number and be given a standard rate or free alternative number.

WorkFlowy - This site is almost too good to describe. It's basically the simplest to-do list possible that mimics the way your brain works. Take a look. Best of all, and known by just a few, if you try to access the site from your iPhone, you get a custom iPhone app.

Our Property - I'm in the middle of moving house, so I'm pretty keen on any resource that helps with the process. Our Property is great for finding out house prices, general advice on the property market and chatting with others also looking at buying or selling their homes.

CampaignMonitor - It's an online tool that helps us at Furnish to create newsletters. If you have a business and an email list, it's worth considering.

LogMeIn - I'm not a fan of carrying laptops or iPads around with me; my iPhone is quite big enough, thank you. LogMeIn allows me to get the screen from my home Mac to appear on my iPhone and I can control it remotely. So, it's the best of both worlds.

Google Docs - Apple are making a big deal of the "cloud", but many of us have been working in the cloud for a long time. Google Docs is fabulous. It's where I keep all my documents and work on them at home, remotely from my iPhone, etc. Apart from the obvious benefit of everything being transparently stored online rather than on your machine (which means access from anywhere, no possibility of data loss), it's extraordinarily simple to use and intuitive compared with Microsoft Office's dreadful and increasingly complex user interface.

23 August 2011