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.

Digital Scrapbooking for You - But first you have to be able to find me!

I've been doing some research on optimizing my website, www.webajeb.com. How was I to know there's so much to learn?? I have had to learn terms like "keywords," "XML site map," "title tags," and "H1 headers," not to mention that I'm going to have to start tweaking the HTML code of my site. Yeah, the HTML code. We won't even go into that!

But, at the end of it all, I should have a website that is more frequently returned in the results list when people are searching for a service such as mine. That's been a big mystery. How to get noticed on the internet.

It's important because, so far, 90% of my clients have found me on the internet. So I have been studying up on what search terms people are using, how often, and how much competition there is for each term. Whew!

Not an exact science, by any means and, like the internet itself, it changes frequently. Someday I hope to have someone else do this stuff for me, like when my business has grown to the point where I have enough work to keep me busy 40 hrs/week. Until then, the extra hours I have available will be spent tweaking the html code of my website pages and believe me, I'd much rather be designing scrapbook layouts! Nothing's drier and more tedious than the html code behind a web page! If you are curious about what it looks like, go to my website, www.webajeb.com, do a right-click on the home page and then choose "View Source."

You'll be sorry you did. Welcome to my world!

Digital Scrapbook Layout - 'Lil Buckaroo

It's been awhile since I did any 8.5" x 11" layouts so it was fun to work within a different shaped space. Here is a layout I did for a new client. Her little daughter was helping out at "Branding Day" at a neighbor's ranch. Isn't that the sweetest little buckaroo??? I'm having so much fun with the photos. Next I'll add the kids' (and Dad's) names in the lower left-hand corner and it will be done.

The background paper and metal cowboy star are Club Scrap (Wild Wild West kit), and the ribbons are from "Real Ribbons for Digital Scrapbookers" by Heirloom Scrapbooks. Font is Captain Howdy.

Photos - Pairing up the Old & New

It's always fun to come across photos, like the two above, that so well illustrate family traits. The boys in these two pictures are cousins, but these pictures were taken 20 years apart. Yet, look how similar they are! Their knees and legs are the same, the way they stand when they first get out of a swimming pool, even the way their hair sticks up in the back.

They are obviously related!

Do you have photos like these, that were taken years apart, or of remote family members, that illustrate a family trait or similarity? I'd love to see them!

ShaZAM'n my Photos

Here's why I love blogs...people share so much COOL STUFF!

The English Geek wrote today about a new, quick & easy Photoshop technique that she'd found at Jessica Sprague's blog. Jessica calls it "ShaZAM" and it really makes the colors POP!

I decided to try it right away, on the above photo of my cousin, Stacy's, youngest son, Nick, during a swimming lesson. This next photo shows the result:
Wow!! The funny thing is that I thought that the original was a perfectly fine photo, but the enhanced version has much better color and contrast. I love this technique and am going to make a Photoshop Action for it becauseI'm going to be using it a LOT. My custom-designed digital scrapbook clients are going to love it, too.

Thx, Jessica!