Digital Scrapbooking and General software links

Hi just my two cents here for those of you with no experience at all and want to put a free site up professionally and fast, retaining all control then I suggest taking a look at www.doteasy.com they have free 100mb with no banner adds like bravehost do. Also if you want to have scripts running on the site they have tech's install them for you. Personally I suggest getting a domain and site through them and having blogger installed as the main script, with some tweaking it can look proffessional and stay interesting with the site changing constantly. I'm not sure if ranking on the major search engines is important to you or not, but if you don't use a blog for your main page it's virtually a waste of money trying to pay to get onto the search engines. I guess it all depends if you want returning hits too, as looking at a nice stagnant page the first time is lovely but everytime you revisit and it still is the same then forget it!. Run a search on scrapbooking on a major search engine and see how many sites come up, last time I checked there were 20,500,000 and I ranked finally on page 13 woohoo! I can tell you not with out some effort on my behalf. Now if you were to do a image scrapbooking search then I'm on page 3 thereabouts depends on the content on my site for that search day. Here I am giving all my secrets away, but take my experience from me, don't learn the hard way on building a website business up!
Now why do I say blogger instead of b2evolution? Because unless you have php scripting knowledge and a database then forget B2evo, blogger keep and run updates and security patches(necessary defence against hackers) on their script constantly and you have no concerns about doing that for yourself. Easy admin controls and photo upload areas. If you want more you can link static html pages to your blog roll website showcasing a gallery and store. Well I'm hoping this news article saves some time and alot of frustration for some of you. Please Comment away, more advice and knowledge freely contributed would be lovely for visitors reading this.

Art Resources, one of the Web's most user friendly resources for learning Paint Shop Pro! Hi I just discovered this great site, and just had to share it with all you guys!!

Av Bros Page Curl Pro 2.0

I really love this Plug-in. Again, I can't say enough about the genius of the brothers Alex and Vladimir Shalikashvili with Pro version of Page Curl.

The interface is tasteful and easy to understand and the curl and fold possibilities are endless.

You can create multiple folds and or curls on the same image as seen with the sticky note on the left which has a fold and a curl or you can create a swirly curl as seen on the colorful ribbon with complete control.

I recommend this plug-in for digital scrappers as well as image manipulation enthusiasts.

Go check out their gallery and then download a free demo and see Page Curl Pro 2.0 in action for yourself.

This layout competition looks awesome, I think the competition will be tough though! So dust off that Photoshop Elements and get cracking(working) cos you only have to the end of June to enter!

“The 2006 Scrappy Awards” is your chance to show off your best digital scrapbook pages and win some cool prizes! Just send us digital scrapbook pages you’ve designed using Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software. Winning entries will be featured in the Photoshop Elements Techniques® Newsletter and Website.
Over $10,000.00 in Prizes to be Given Away for “The 2006 Scrappy Awards!”
One Grand Prize package will be awarded for Best Of Show and One prize package will be awarded to the First Place entry in each of the 10 categories.
You may submit a single digital scrapbook page in any of the following categories:

Holiday, Patriotic/Military, Sports, Wedding, Graduation, Family, Love/Romance, Travel, Baby, Pet

Pages: 1 2

I've been asked what my recomendations are for digital scrapbooking, and it's hard for me to recommend any one program as I am familiar with quite a few and use them all differently for different tasks, I'd love to just point you to a program and say get that one, but advising you to spend your money on a program that you find overwhelming and very frustrating is not what I want to do to you, so my suggestion for you is to first take a look at all the interfaces of the various different programs free tutorials found on the web or at Lynda.com. Then download the program you feel is friendliest to use,They all offer free trials(usually a period of 15-30days)to test that program fully . Set aside a weekend and try to make a layout, download a freebie and see how easy it is to use and combine all the elements and photos into an arrangement, Please do this with only one program at a time, you will need the full 15 days to experience the program fully and it's useability. No good downloading several, installing them and only having the chance to explore one or two before their free trials run out.GIMP is free so no need to worry about time with that, still looking for suport tutorials for digital scrapbooking with this program, haven't found many at all, so that's a good thing to keep in mind. Also remember I have actually done graphic design school courses with Adobe photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to become familiar with these programs, I needed to have a teacher showing me the capibilities of these programs, I found them very overwhelming at first and it has taken me along time to become familiar with using them. I'm still learning how to use all the many different features and techniques of these powerful programs, I take tutorials online all the time trying to keep upto date on the many new techniques. Adobe Elements an easier more compact version of photoshop have a very user friendly tutorial built in and going through that makes the program so easy to use. Corel Jasc PSP (Paint Shop Pro) is a fun program that does it all, most of the little cute clipart you see around the web has usually been made with this program, from animation to background making layering photos, it does it all, saying that, a recent visit to their site showed me their PSP PRO X program comes with over 500 elements and clipart like buttons and flowers etc... especially great for digital scrapbooking. Now Xara, well it's not a very well known graphics program and I've only just become aware of it in the last year, but it's been around for years, it's a program full of capabilities that are just to good to believe, unfortunately there are no video tutorials I have found for this program, but it does have a great many written tutorials with screen captures and support sites to help you learn the program. Microsoft Image Pro(60 day free trial)I have to say I'm not familiar with at all, sorry about that. But saying that, the very many digital scrapbooking forums I have been to and posts I have read, it seems to be the number one choice for beginners and digital scrapaholics alike to use, I've seen some amazing layouts done using this program. Read more indepth critique. There are digital scrapbooking tutorials for this program to. I have to go for now, I'll contiue on with this topic another time, if you have a program you enjoy please leave comments of your preferences to help others who want to get into digital scrapbooking but not sure of what program choice to make.