Being a part of community where you feel comfortable can lead to new friends, new directions in your designs, and great tips on everything from products to techniques. Finding the right online community can be compared to searching for a new neighborhood with one big advantage—you can “reside” in more than one at a time.
Join us on our virtual tour of homes as we visit various online communities. Feel welcome to weigh in with your own observations about the feature community as well as suggestions for our next stop.
Our tour begins with one of the newer places to neighborhoods online called spottedcanary.com. This bright and cheery site offers residents a chance to revel in scrapbooking as well as many other crafts. Unique features here are expanded galleries that allow each member to not only post a photo but also easy to follow instructions and special notes by the designer.
The Teen Mini Album pictured here by member CorrineMB has multiple photos and instructions. The site is well organized with easy to read tabs featuring links for beginners and more advanced scrappers. Frequent visitors link right to the newest posts while everyone can easy catch up on areas of special interest just by visiting the forum. As with some other online forums, members are rewarded for their activity with points that allow additional features to become available based on their contributions. Most free online communities have some form of sponsorship and spottedcanary.com is no exception. The powerhouse behind this relatively new site (all indicators say it was formed in spring of 2009 but that cannot be verified easily on the site) is EK Success. You can visit this site and access many of the features without joining first so drop by and meet your neighbors at spottedcanary.com—pull up a monitor and stay awhile. Look me up while you’re there as user name Artful Tourist. I’ve got two projects posted including the Bliss Bar seen here:
