I am so proud of my sister! She provides the technical support for my site. She built it & updates it. And I appreciate her talents so much! Together we launched DigiScrapInfo.com in Jan 2007 and grew a community around it. She has taken it over & has continued to evolve it. It was our sandbox for learning about all things online: community building, marketing, organic SEO, web analytics, etc.
Recently my sister launched a new site, DigiScrapFinder.com. It’s a sister site to DigiScrapInfo.com in that the target audience of digital scrapbooking ladies. These women are creators in a number of ways. Many have created cottage industries online & the rest of them are supporting them using Paypal! It’s a market that’s growing at an incredible rate! These ladies also enjoy the many aspects of networking, learning & sharing in a true community fashion.
Here’s Heidi’s announcement of DigiScrapFinder’s launch:
My concept behind the site is that digiscrappers are searching for specific subject digital kits. There are so many digital scrapbook stores out there and its sometimes hard to find what you need. This site will be a place for digital scrapbook designers to add their digital kits to advertise their digital kits and for the digital scrapbookers to come and look for digital kits. It isn’t site or store specific.
DigiScrapFinder is a place to go to search for digital kits by subject. All the digital kits come from different stores from around the web. If you like this service, feel free to upload your digital kit previews to DigiScrapFinder in the appropriate subject. This is a site where the more the community participates to better the site!
This is a new site so the gallery isn’t complete and never will be complete because designers are coming out daily with products! Many category subjects do not contain a lot of previews or any. More previews will continue to be added. But check out Project365. I have uploaded a lot of different Project 365 kits found around the digital scrapbooking community. In addition, we welcome you adding your own categories. We got the basic structure going but we want you to add. Again, the more you participate the better the site!
Heidi’s newest venture is something that is notable for a number of reasons:
- The site is for the community
- Community contributions will add value to the site
- It supports all digital designers without respect to their store affiliation
- The community is diverse & spread across many sites so this is a collective effort
- The site has a business model.
- Store owners recognize the value of purchasing banner space
- It’s the perfect place for affiliate programs for related services such as printing
- And Google Ads …. (what, Heidi?!!)
I know that Heidi reads my blog, so I”ll give her some suggestions here.
- Displaying the number of downloads would be helpful to users
- Would people like to vote on kits they find useful? or that they’ve used?
- it would be cool if they could be sorted by most downloaded, most popular, newest, etc
The great thing about niche communities is that once you get to know your customer segment then you can create sites like this that cater to their needs.
Thanks for sharing..
I enjoy building websites. This one was a lot of fun. I have heard a lot of excellent feedback on the site so far. My goal was to create an easy way for uploading and viewing the digital kits around the digital scrapbooking community. The designers are enjoying it.. Why wouldn’t they?? its another place to advertise. The digital scrapbookers are enjoying having a mega mall to browse. Here is one comment from a user “I feel like I’m browsing through a catalog from Eddie Bauer!” So all in all, the site is being received well.
As for the suggestions..
# of downloads — since the gallery is just links they don’t download anything. At the bottom there is stats on how many digital kits are in the gallery. currently 1663! That’s how many been entered in the first week.
voting/review — the gallery does support but I turned off this feature. I turned it off because I thought that it would be too easy for the voting to get skewed (ct members come in and click on the designers links) and reviews? A group of women reviewing other womens kits. that just scares me. I wanted the site to stay more impartial.
stats are coming. I do have a link to newest and most viewed (right now its kind of hidden in the menu system) I wasn’t going to start prominently displaying the stats until they are real from use and not testing it.
I also am collecting stats. The hardest is collecting what people go to check out the store, cause the stat that I need is what was their exit link. Since the images go into a cooliris slideshow I lose the user stats once they enter. I am seeing what stats I collect and see what might be useful to share.
Also checking out a new stats tool called Woopra its pretty cool.
I never knew digital scrapbooking existed, but it looks kinda neat.
Heidi – Perhaps instead of a full-blown review series you could set up a simple set of staff recommendations like you might see at a book store? I always enjoy seeing what the ten people at the store think is worth reading this month. If handled properly I don’t think it would bias the site much in favor of one contributor or another.