A Fun Laptop Crop, and some Personal Layouts

Last Saturday a friend and I attended DigitalScrapbookingPlace.com's very first laptop crop at Adobe Headquarters in San Jose, CA. It was a blast! The ladies did a GREAT job. They had a big room set up with tables for our laptops, external hard drives, etc. There were about 100 of us attending; you should have seen the tangle of power cords under the tables, ha ha!

Anyway, we all had a great time, got fed lunch and dinner and snacks, watched some demos, learned some new techniques, won lots of prizes (well, everyone else did, all I got was a mousepad!), and Best of All, for me anyway, was getting LOTS of my own, personal layouts done.

Here are some of them:My nephew, Blake. Christmas family portrait. Digi-paper and elements by Claudi Designs. In my backyard.At the Dixon May Fair in 2007. Yes, that's me eating, eating, eating, junk food! (For more on my junk food habits check out this post on my personal blog.) Paper and elements from Club Scrap's Farmer's Market kit.

My cat, Jack, who loves water and bubbles, and likes to sit on the edge of the tub while I take a bath. Paper is Club Scrap; I can't remember off-hand where the rick-rack came from, darn it.
This year's Torchlight Parade.
Sis-in-law Maureen with her first grandbaby; three of my nieces and the same baby (yep, it's Blake again)! More Club Scrap - I love that club!
Michael, visiting from China in January.

These layouts were all over the board with regard to subjects and dates. Some of them were half-done so it was great to get them finished. I just worked on whatever photos grabbed my attention that day, and it was very freeing and relaxing and fun.

I even sent off an order for a dozen 12x12 prints of MY layouts to go in MY albums!

Tomorrow I'll be back to work on client layouts which are also fun, rewarding, and satisfying, just in a different way. I'm so thankful to my customers for their loyalty and their on-going business. Except for taking the month of June off, I have had steady work all year and my business is growing, and for that I am very grateful.

Creating Digital Wedding Albums for Others

I'm currently working on a digital wedding album for one of my customers. This is a photo of the bride in her exquisite gown, veil, and holding a bouquet of her favorite flowers, in a beautiful, natural setting, on one of the most important days of her life.

When I create layouts using very formal photos like these I like to keep the pages very simple. The first thing I want a viewer's eye drawn to is the all-important subject of the photo, in this case the bride. To do that I use a bold, textured background that appears striking only in contrast, and as a complement, to the photo. I like a double- or triple-matte with colors that bring out the subject of the photo. A simple embossed embellishment (the bouquet of flowers) and perhaps a word or two that expresses the emotion of the photo, and that's it. In my mind nothing more is needed.

The subject of the photo speaks for herself.

Simply beautiful.

Baby Blake, and my Newsletter Goof-up

My niece, Seana, and her boyfriend, Randy, had a baby boy this past June. Seana sent me some digital photos of little Blake and I totally fell in love with one in particular. I enlarged it to almost fill a 12x12 canvas, then I made digital copies of various parts of the photo, like his little fingers and nose, resized them, and placed them at the bottom, in a row. I love how it turned out. And can you believe it? My inspiration for the layout came from an ad in a magazine.

Having a digital scrapbook layout come out just the way I imagine it in my mind, and almost effortlessly, is a great feeling. Starting up and running a small business these days is incredibly rewarding, too, but also incredibly exhausting. Every day I have more to learn and, typical of my personality type which is to just jump into things with great excitement & enthusiasm but without a lot of thought or preparation, I personally learn a LOT from experience (also known as making mistakes)! I was all proud of myself because I had managed to get my newsletter for October out by the 5th of the month (last month I didn't get it out until the 9th) but then yesterday I was talking to my friend, Susan, on the phone, who is on my mailing list, and I asked her if she got it and she said she hadn't. Huh??? I had tested it and everything.....! Well, as it turns out, after I tested it by sending it to myself and checking to make sure the links worked and it looked good, I was ready to send it out "for real" and what did I do? Somehow I sent it -- again -- to my test distribution list, which only has 2 addresses on it -- both mine! ARGH. I hadn't bothered to check to make sure it went to the correct number of addresses......just goes to show....ya gotta double-check everything. As I told Susan, "no wonder big companies have entire ITS departments....!" My dream is that someday I will be able to afford to pay someone else to handle stuff like that and I can concentrate on creating gorgeous layouts.

On the bright side, it was a good thing I found out that the newsletter hadn't gone out so I could quickly re-send it, and to the correct distribution list this time. Yet another mistake that I won't make again. I'm pretty good at not repeating things like that. It's probably the total humiliation that I feel when I do something so stupid!

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October News

I'm a little slow these days getting everything done. My newsletter for October isn't even written yet, let alone sent out! But I did get the new calendar page done, and the template freebie, so be sure to visit my website to download them. I created the calendar page while I was visiting my mom in Simi Valley, CA., and then I just made the template yesterday, and got both uploaded to http://www.webajeb.com/. I've included directions on using both, so I hope you enjoy my freebies! I noticed this a.m. that a couple of people have already downloaded the calendar page so some of you must have been waiting anxiously, and I apologize for the delay!

The Nature Lover's template (pictured below) is based on a layout I did for my veterinarian, Dr. Brisbin. You can see his entire album on my website; just click on the "slideshows" link at the top of the homepage. The calendar pages have been so much fun to create that I'm thinking of creating an entire year's worth for 2008 and offering it on my website. Of course, it may not happen by January with everything else that is going on.

Many of you know, if you read my other blog (http://www.deztalkin.blogspot.com/), that my husband and I are heading out on an 8 week sailing cruise on the 17th of this month. So, needless to say, we are running around like crazy trying to get ready. Adding to the "fun" is my hubby's bout with strep throat, and me having pulled a muscle in my back 2 days ago. PLUS, our oldest son and his fiancee have planned a BBQ in southern california for their parents and grand-parents to meet and get to know each other. That's on the 14th which means a drive down there and back, using up 3 to 4 days of our preparation time.

All of these things are making is difficult for me to really concentrate on my little biz, and it's marketing needs. And, since we'll be gone and my internet time will be much more limited, I am going to have to defer any new work until I return. It's frustrating, yet it couldn't happen at a better time since, at the moment, I don't have any new work! I am mainly working on marketing ideas/strategies, creating the freebies & newsletters, updating blogs, as well as fine-tuning my website. There are bells and whistles I'd love to add to it (a counter, for one) but all these things take time and, in some cases, learning new stuff.

While we are on our trip I will be doing a LOT of layout work, using my own photos. It would be a good time, too, to work on the 2008 calendar. I'd also love to create lots more templates that I could offer individually and at a really good price. Internet access will be sporadic at best, so most of what I will work on will have to be offline. But keep watching this blog for updates, and visit my website often, too. I'll be updating both as I am able. And, as always, e-me anytime and for any reason; deborah@webajeb.com. I love hearing from you!

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Digi-Scrappin' Full-Time Now!

A long-awaited day has finally arrived. I am now "employer-free" and ready to devote a lot more time to my little business. It's exciting to think I can plan and portion my days in whatever way I want, and I'll have the time to do the marketing that's necessary to bring in more clients and more work.

I'll be doing some fine-tuning of my "new" website, as well as uploading lots of new samples of my work. More freebies, too! Calendar pages for October, November, and December, and digital scrapbooking templates, too.

I have follow-up work to do with former clients, the October newsletter to send out, as well as tons of learning to do now that I've upgraded my PhotoShop software to CS3. Boy, is that software cool! Not to mention also going on a long sailing cruise next month, but my laptop is going along, too, and most marinas now have free wireless internet (how cool is that?) so I'll still be able to spend time "on-line."

So stay tuned, and check back frequently, both here and at http://www.webajeb.com/!

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Website Woes

I'm far from a professional website-builder but, because my small business is still less than a year old, and barely in the black, I do all my own website work (http://www.webajeb.com/). There was a definite learning curve there but with the help of the technical folks at Crystal Tech (where my website is hosted) and their on-line web-building tool, I actually built quite a nice website. I even learned a little about html so that I could make a tweak or two to the source code. There were a few little flaws in my design that I wasn't totally happy with but I learned to live with them.

Well, yesterday I got it into my head that at long last I was going to fix one of those little flaws. I wanted all my main category links (like About Us, Pricing, and Specials) in the header of the website, instead of some up there, and the rest in the body of each page. It is during the "build" process that those links are created, and they are not directly editable once they have been created. Plus, I kinda wanted to change the template I was using to something a little simpler and cleaner looking. So I stepped through the build process using the tool provided by Crystal Tech, choosing a new template, and specifying the links I wanted to display in the header.

What I didn't realize was that the tool was creating BLANK pages for the header links and, since the names of those links (or web pages) were the same as before, my original web pages with all the cool content I had slaved over, were overwritten!!! AUGH!

Eighty percent of my website was hosed! Gone! Kaput!

After some spinning around the room and swearing (luckily my husband wasn't at home at the time), I tried to calm down and THINK. I realized I had back-up copies of a few of the lost web pages so I restored those. Then I simply sat myself down and plugged through re-creating the rest. Since I originally built the website and have tweaked it a hundred times over the last 8 months, I was able to dredge most of it up from memory. The build process didn't delete ANY of my image files so I didn't have to search them down on my hard-drive and re-upload, so that was a big help.

I'm 95% done now and, what do you know? I like the website better now than I did before! And I learned some new stuff, too, like always keep back-up copies of every website page! I actually have two backup copies of each page now: one on-line, and one on my hard-drive.

How much you want to bet I never need them???

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Webajeb's Got Blog!

Hi, and welcome to BlogWebajeb!

I'm Deborah, and I own and run Webajeb Digital Photo Albums & Portfolios, a fledgling company that I started in March of 2007. I'm one of that new breed called a "Scrapbooker for Hire," but not your ordinary scrapbooker for hire, I am a DIGITAL scrapbooker for hire. Quite a different animal, and one that I hope you will enjoy getting to know through my posts. To quickly get a good idea of what I'm talking about feel free to visit my website http://www.webajeb.com/ and visit my Gallery. Lots of GREAT stuff in there!

Here, I'll be blogging about my experiences in starting up a small business; the ups-and-downs, lessons learned, my continual growth as a digital artist, and all my discoveries along the way. I hope you'll visit often, and leave comments. I love feedback!

More soon! Meanwhile, feel free to email me anytime!

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