New single-family home sales rose 5.7% from August to September, with 389,000 homes sold last month, according to the  U.S. Census Bureau.

That is up from 368,000 sales in August and 27.1% above year ago levels when only 306,000 units were sold.

The median sales price of a home in September hit $242,400 while the average price hovered at $292,400.

“September’s rise in new home sales is another sign that homebuyers are becoming more willing and more able to splash out on a new home,” research firm Capital Economics said in response to the report.

The number of new homes for sale at the end of September reached 145,000, which reflects a 4.5-month supply of homes at today’s sales pace.

Econoday called the jump in home sales the best annual rate increase since mid-2010 when the market was still benefitting from homebuyer tax credits.

“September’s gain is convincing and is led, with a 16.8% jump, by the South which is far larger than all other regions combined,” Econoday said. “Supply, at 4.5 months for the lowest reading since 2005, is very tight and is limiting sales.”

Have you ever woken up one day, looked at your blog’s header and other visual elements, and thought, “My, this is ugly!”

You need a visual redesign.

What to do?

There are two solutions to this problem: you hire a designer to work on your new visuals from scratch, or you try to do it yourself. The first solution can come at a cost, so cash-strapped bloggers can easily be tempted to try building their blog’s visual elements by themselves.

But what if, like me, you’re visually incompetent? I mean, really incompetent? You can’t draw a stick figure to save your life, and you know absolutely nothing about the basics of visual design. You’re a writer, after all, and writers are better off writing than playing around with pictures.

And yet, you can’t afford a designer, so you need to find a way, any way, to do it yourself.

In this article, I will share the lessons I have learned trying to redesign my blog visuals on my own—header, logo, and all.

Start with software that you understand

We’ve all tried to play with those complex professional photo and visual design programs. You load a picture or an empty canvas and you think “Wow, with all these great tools, I’m sure I can come up with something amazing!”

Well, not so much. After five minutes of trying to understand the functions of the program, you give up. This happened to me time and time again, until I discovered a nice little Mac app called Logoist.

Logoist is simple and has all the functions I need. I can use cliparts from its extensive library, add text, apply filters and effects and insert pictures and photos. Its interface is intuitive and it has a few tutorials to show you the ropes. It also has automatic grid lines that help align all your elements. This simplicity let me create more freely than any professional design program could.

There are a lot of apps and programs you can use for both Mac and PC. Some are free and most are reasonably priced. You don’t have to go for the $500 creative suite to get the job done.

Black and white are your friends

I’ve always worked under the principle that, when in doubt, you should take the simplest route. In visual design, black and white is a great base to start with.

A black and white design looks professional, clean, and easy to work with. You don’t have to worry about colors matching or clashing. You know your text and your visual elements will be readable on a computer screen, a tablet or a smartphone. Black and white reminds readers of printed paper, something that’s ubiquitous and familiar. It’s trustworthy.

But of course, black and white can become a little bland. To add variety, choose one (and when I say that, I really mean one) accent color for your sidebar widgets, for the picture in your logo, or for the blog title in your header.

For example, on my writer’s website, I decided to go with dark red. It’s a color I like, and I think it brings about the right amount of visual interest. On my blog, I count on the pictures inserted in my posts for a blast of color.

Play with fonts

For my blog’s header, I decided to keep everything simple and play with fonts rather than pictures or images. Each word of my title (Read, Write, Live) uses a different font that expresses something unique about that word.

“Read” is in a formal, serif type that you could find in a book or newspaper. “Write” is in a handwritten-looking font that illustrates the act of writing on paper and separates it visually the other two words. “Live” is in a bold, sans-serif font with unexpected lines. I added a small ornament (one of the cliparts in Logoist) in the middle for visual interest.

Here’s the logo version, with the first letter of each word:

Fonts are great because you can give personality to words and ideas before they are processed by the brain through reading. They leave an instant impression, and can make or break the viewer’s desire to read on.

A tool I love for choosing awesome fonts is Google Fonts. If you’re tired of Times New Roman and Comic Sans, Google Fonts has an impressive collection of independent, public domain fonts you can use.

Be yourself, be realistic

The most important thing when you’re stuck having to design your own visual elements without training is to be honest with yourself. If you don’t know how to use vector software, then don’t. There are a lot of solutions that are within your reach and your abilities.

You also need to be realistic: there is no substitute for a professional design. As much as a self-designed header and logo can fill in temporarily, as soon as you get a steady flow of readers, you’ll be expected to get some custom, professional visual design on your blog. But as a beginner or novice blogger, a handmade, simple header and minimal visual elements can go a long way

One last thing: remember to have fun. I can tell you that this kind of visual work can be absorbing and exciting when you really get into it. I didn’t know I could come up with something so attractive on my own. I was very proud of the results, and it got me compliments from readers too!

Have you ever tried to design your own visual elements? Do you have any other basic visual design tips you’d like to share with the visually incompetent among us? I’d love to hear from you!

Sales of existing homes slipped from August to September but were still up strongly from a year ago — a sign that the national housing market is finding solid ground, the National Association of Realtors said today.

At a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.75 million, sales of single-family homes, townhomes, condos and co-ops were down 1.7 percent from August to September, but up 11 percent from a year ago.

September sales of existing homes were up 11 percent from last September with a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.75 million, which represents a slight dip of 1.7 percent from August’s upwardly revised rate of 4.83 million.

The 2.32 million homes on the market at the end of September represented a 5.9-month supply, down from 8.1 months a year ago. Many analysts view a six-month supply of housing as an even balance between buyer and seller demand.

Thanks to tight inventories, the national median home price was up 11.3 percent to $183,900 from a year ago, the seventh month in a row of annual increases and the longest stretch of annual increases in six years.

“We’re experiencing a genuine recovery,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, in a statement. “More people are attempting to buy homes than are able to qualify for mortgages, and recent price increases are not deterring buyer interest,” he said.

Low inventory will be a temporary issue, said Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist. “Rising prices will get some homeowners back above water and willing to sell their homes, and tight inventory will encourage builders to keep ramping up new construction, bringing more new homes to market,” he said.

First-time buyers accounted for 32 percent of purchasers in September, up from 31 percent in August.

Foreclosures and short sales sold for 21 percent below market value, on average, and accounted for 24 percent of September’s sales.

All-cash deals accounted for 28 percent of September’s sales — up a percentage point from August and down two from last September.

Existing-home sales, September 2012

Seasonally adjusted annual rate	4.75 million
% change from September 2011	11.0%
% change from August 2012	-1.7%
National median price	$183,900
% change from September 2011	11.3%
Unsold inventory (months’ supply)	5.9
Share of all-cash buyers	28%
Share of investor buyers	18%
Share of first-time buyers	32%
Share of distressed sales	24%

Source: National Association of Realtors

All U.S. regions saw existing-home sales and prices rise in September from a year ago.

As was the case in August, the Midwest led the way in home sales with a 19.6 percent year-over-year increase to an annual rate of 1.1 million sales. The median price in the Midwest also rose in September from a year ago, up 7 percent to $145,200.

The South saw sales jump 14.2 percent from last September to an annual rate of 1.93 million. Median prices jumped, too, to 13.1 percent from last September to $163,600.

Home sales rose 7.3 in the Northeast on an annual basis to a rate of 590,000. Median prices in the region rose 4.1 percent to $238,700.

The West experienced a slight 0.9 percent yearly increase in home sales to 1.13 million, but saw the largest yearly median price jump of any region, 18.4 percent to $246,300, in September.

Q: We’re going to be selling our building, which will involve brokers and interested buyers looking at our apartments. Several tenants think we should give them many days’ notice and consult them when scheduling visits. Do our tenants have the legal right to make these demands?

A: Putting up with rental applicants evaluating a home’s potential or dealing with buyers eyeing the property during a sale are hassles every tenant encounters eventually. But most states give tenants some protections — more than half have laws that specify how much notice a landlord must give before entering a tenant’s apartment. Common periods are two days or 24 hours. Some state laws are less useful, requiring “reasonable notice,” whatever that means. Notice requirements don’t apply to common areas such as the lobby, hallways and recreation areas. In these places, owners are free to bring visitors at any time and without notice.

So the first thing you need to do is to find out what your state law has to say about showing rentals to prospective buyers and tenants. But aside from your legal obligations to give adequate notice, let’s think about how you might accommodate your tenants in other ways, too. Don’t forget that uncooperative residents can have a real effect on how nicely your property shows — you don’t want grumbling residents pointing out deferred maintenance, do you?

Consider asking to meet with a delegation from the tenants’ group to discuss how this transition time can be made easier for them. Think ahead of reasonable requests that won’t seriously affect your ability to market the property, such as being willing to show the property at specified times and days. You might also consider modest rent reductions to compensate tenants for the disruption caused by the sale.

A savvy owner will make these concessions, realizing that cooperation by building residents is essential to marketing efforts and eventual sale — no seller wants to try to navigate a sea of resentful, gloomy residents, and no buyer wants to inherit a building full of angry people.

Q: I have been asked to sign a clause in a residential lease that states that the tenant agrees not to make any claims against the landlord for any loss or damage caused by “any accidents beyond the reasonable control of Landlord.” Is this legal? –Davey R.

A: Your landlord is attempting to avoid lawsuits brought by tenants who have suffered economic losses or injuries on the rental property. These claims often arise. For example, suppose your landlord fails to maintain a set of lobby stairs, and you fall and are injured. You might decide to sue for medical bills, lost earnings, and pain and suffering.

Fear not. In virtually every state, the clause in your lease would not bar such a suit. That’s because the clause shields the landlord only from claims that result from situations beyond his reasonable control. In our example, the monitoring and repair of the lobby stairs are obviously his responsibility, not yours, and not anyone else’s.

It might strike you as odd that landlords think it necessary to tell tenants that they won’t be held responsible for accidents that are beyond their reasonable control. After all, it stands to reason that we would make people responsible only for the mistakes that they could have avoided. But that common-sense conclusion will not stop some tenants from making a claim or suing, who think that any accident on the landlord’s property is the fault of the landlord.

For example, suppose the tenant parks in his assigned parking spot, but during the night a branch from a tree planted on the street breaks off and smashes his car. Thinking that because the damage happened while his car was parked on the rental property, the tenant demands compensation from the landlord or the landlord’s insurance company. In such a situation, unless the tenant can prove that the landlord somehow could have avoided the accident (Did the landlord know of the tree’s frailty and fail to warn tenants? Was the landlord legally obliged to monitor the tree and trim it?), the tenant won’t collect. But in the meantime, the landlord will have spent time and effort defeating the claim.

The clause in your lease is placed there to remind tenants that the landlord’s ability to avoid accidents is limited to those situations in which he has control. But don’t assume that the “control or not” question is always black and white.

In California some years back, a landlord was held liable when a tenant slipped and fell on a broken concrete pathway that led from the rental property to an adjacent street. Even though the landlord did not own the land under the path and could not have repaired it on his own, he was aware that his tenants regularly used it as a shortcut and failed to warn them of the path’s dangerousness. That was enough to make him at least responsible.

In the end, signing off on this clause will not defeat a valid claim brought by a tenant who claims to have been injured or economically damaged by the landlord’s carelessness. If the claim is bogus (suing the landlord for an act of God, for example), it will get tossed out of court. If the question is close, the court will resolve it, regardless of what the lease does or does not say.

Janet Portman is an attorney and managing editor at Nolo. She specializes in landlord/tenant law and is co-author of “Every Landlord’s Legal Guide” and “Every Tenant’s Legal Guide.” She can be reached at janet@inman.com.