When I bought my two-bedroom flat in southwest London four years ago, its white walls, neutral carpets and basic but functional kitchen meant I could move in pretty much straightaway. Bar buying the odd bit of Ikea furniture, I did nothing to the place.

Now, though, the moth-infested carpet, peeling kitchen lino and slightly grubby walls are starting to depress me. It’s time for a makeover. But where to start? The options are endless and, despite spending hours poring over interiors magazines, I’m terrified I’ll ruin everything – especially on my limited budget of about £1,000 per room.

I could employ an interior designer, but they don’t come cheap: Alan Hughes, vice-principal of the Inchbald School of Design, in central London, says that even the most junior interior designer costs £20-£25 an hour – or at least £160 a day. If you want an established name, expect to pay far more: Helen Green Design, for example, charges 10% of the cost of every project, the cheapest of which is usually not less than £10,000.

Help could be at hand, however, with the launch of a new website. Mydeco, which goes live tomorrow, is the latest venture by Martha Lane Fox, 34, and Brent Hoberman, 39, who made their names – and fortunes – when they founded Lastminute.com, then survived the dotcom crash. Their new site allows people to create a virtual version of their home in order to experiment online with paint, wallpaper, flooring, furniture and lighting – all of which you can then buy through the site.

As part of the aim of creating a “design community”, others can then comment on your virtual room, suggest ideas and even, if they are sufficiently inspired, buy one of the items of furniture in it themselves – giving you, the “designer”, a cut. You can also “befriend” the site’s official designers (Kelly Hoppen and John Stefanidis, among others) and pick up some style pointers from them.

“Between 50% and 60% of people need pictorial representation of something to visualise it,” says Hoberman, who had the idea for Mydeco when he bought a house and couldn’t picture what he could do with it – despite being married to an interior designer. And, he adds, the level of choice today just aggravates the problem: “When you’re talking about buying furniture, you need to get across the broad range of options – and why one sofa is 10 times more expensive than another, or where to find them all.” Mydeco, Hoberman claims, will help people to decorate room by room and work out how to put furniture together.

So, can clicking around with my mouse really help me to work out what my flat could look like? And is Mydeco different to the internet-based design advisers already out there? I went online to see how they compare.

www.mydeco.com

The home page, I have to admit, sends a excited tingle down my spine. “Revolutionise the way you shop for your home,” it declares. You must register, but Mydeco is free to use (its founders get commission on products sold via the site). Its “virtual planner” tool will help me to design my perfect room: I can compare interior styles from a library of ideas, or check out other site members’ attempts at interior design and steal a few tips from them.

I take the “style DNA” test to find out what look will make me happy. Apparently, I have “international chic” – effortless, cosmopolitan. I always knew it was in there somewhere. Having flicked through various pictures of inspirational rooms and earmarked a few pieces of furniture (which I can save for future reference), I load the dimensions of my sitting room into the “virtual planner” and try to lay out a room.

It takes a while. You have to manipulate a template, which is time-consuming and tedious, especially as it won’t let me insert a window where there is supposed to be one. Once I have a rough approximation of what my room looks like, however, I can add furniture, from an L-shaped sofa to a dining table, then paint the walls with colours from Dulux, Designer Paint and Craig & Rose, or paste up one of 41 wallpaper samples.

It’s all too ethereal, so I upload a photo of the real room and try painting that. This is better: if only I could dye my sofa blue, I could get the perfect look. But, while the planning tools on Mydeco are useful, they are a bit too complex for me. I would rather flick through the lovely furniture pictures, draw up a wish list and dream about being able to afford an interior designer.

Verdict: Great for ideas and inspiration, especially as everything’s on one site. But, until I get a bit more tech-savvy, I’ll stay away from virtual room design. 8/10

www.housetohome.co.uk

Run by IPC Media, which publishes a plethora of glossy interiors magazines, this free site is an amalgamation of brands and products, “inspirational rooms” of the sort featured by the interiors mags in its publishing stable, and expert advice on everything from caring for a wooden floor to brightening up a bathroom. Practical tools include colour, room and garden planning programmes, as well as an online calculator, so you can work out how many tins of paint or rolls of wallpaper you will need for a particular project.

I kick off with the “celebrity home style quiz”. It turns out my style is like Stella McCartney’s, only with more leather. The colour planner is fun, but limited: the generic room images are extremely stylish, but they certainly don’t resemble anything in my little flat, and the only colours you can test are by Crown. The room planner is better: there are several prebuilt layouts, but I can also input my real room’s dimensions and work out where the furniture could go.

It takes me a few goes to work out how to alter the dimensions, by which time I’m a bit bored – and the generic furniture is less fun than having real-life products to drop in, à la Mydeco. On the plus side, I can save ideas in an online “scrapbook”.

Verdict: Full of products and inspirational images, the site is great for a trawl when you can’t be bothered – or can’t afford – to buy every interiors magazine going. The planning tools are a bit gimmicky, though: pen, paper and a few tester pots of paint would work just as well. 6/10

www.dulux.co.uk

The sheer size of the Dulux range throws me into a panic every time I contemplate one of the company’s colour charts. The website, however, is quite fun. It shows the latest trends for 2008, as well as ideas for colour schemes. You can find out which paints are suitable for a particular surface; or, if you’re dithering about what colour you should paint your sitting room to show off that prized red leather chair, you can click on the nearest shade and the site will suggest complementary colours.

There are virtual room layouts to colour in, or you can upload a photo of your own room and “paint” it.

Again, a paint calculator features, and you can also find localdec-orators operating under the government-endorsed Trust-Mark scheme.

For inspiration, I take a “colour chemistry” quiz, which asks a lot of inane questions – “How would your friends describe your personality?” It turns out I’m a “comfort creator” and should be using golds and reds. Attempting to put this into practice, I try colouring in some virtual room layouts. Again, this gets tedious, as none of the rooms looks like mine, so I upload a real picture of my sitting room to decorate.

Unfortunately, the way the photograph is rendered online means “painting” it creates an interesting, slightly graffiti-esque effect – very cool, but nothing like my sitting room. You also have to decide your “mood board” of colours at the start, which means a lot of dragging and dropping from a paint chart to a folder; this is labour-intensive and rapidly becomes dull.

Verdict: It’s quite interesting to see how certain colours work together, but the site did nothing to combat my Dulux colour-chart anxiety, and there’s no capacity to go 3-D or look at furniture. 4/10

So, will I be using any of the sites to change my home? Certainly for inspiration – and the choice of furniture at Mydeco will save me many a tiring trek along the high street. But, until the virtual world becomes more appealing than the real one, my basic computer skills mean it’s easier and faster for me to keep heading down to B&Q for a few tester pots of paint. Oh, and I might give my friend the interior designer a call along the way.

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