The story of digitalscrapbooking.de which became digitalscrapgirl.com

(you find the freebie at the bottom of this article)

good news! or bad - as you want to see :P
we have to start all over - rebuild the whole site, the attack damaged our database and it couldn´t be fixed. so well...
this morning I felt really lost...but obviously I didn´t count on all the great people I met during the last year...nayyan, maren, sylvia, nina, kimmi, monica, our programmer - just to remember some. they all said - no problem - when do we restart??? well, so many encouragement - i never thought that they love the site as much as we do....and i´m so happy about that!!!! so most probably you think i should be sad but i cannot - why at all? we have the possibility to start again, we have a great team we can count on and so .... we face the task which lies in front of us.
why i also write is that i found some images on our old server (yes, i can still get the files) which document how we started.

October 7th, 2006

Our site was created, joomla installed and we went crazy for a shop we didn´t found so far. that was the first try for a banner:


...and the one we lived with for a time. then we got more and more introduced to joomla and after some weeks we already had a new one. so far we never had heard a word about multiple downloads, https or even the problem with integrating new components into joomla which are not for that cms (like photopost, phpbb forum, etc).

November, 2006

Pelin joined us, the first foreign DSG designer ever and we got our shop!


Then Pelin asked Nayyan to be a CM on our site and Nayyan made a great job!
Because of that I met Nayyan, too, and she thought it was the time for a make over :-)
She made a new label for us:


Most probably that was the site you found when you found us the first time. After having a new appearence the site was really nice...but: we had a german/english mix and somehow our users were totally unhappy with that and couldn´t find their way around....well...........time again for us to rethink.
At that time I enjoyed working with three girls - Susi, Pelin and Nayyan - who all cared very much about DS and contributed to make it a success.

December, 2006

We had an adventcalendar - a new surprise download each day! Our users loved it and we decided to keep the daily download. It was just an organisational problem - we had to do a kit each week and that with just two designers. Because I never created a kit so far Pelin and Susi had to do the work. We started with the "New Year´s Resolution Kit" - it was a big success :-)
Additional we had also 1000 login problems again and couldn´t get that solved :P

January, 2007

January was the time when tried to get Nayyan to designing - I didn´t need much encouragement - in more than a short time she got a great designer...

February, 2007

Another great designer joined our team - Kleopatra aka Sylvia. I totally love her designs and I couldn´t believe that she wanted to come to us :-)
But she did and is still with us.

April, 2007

A second german shop closed its doors and we got a lot of new designers. We already had 500 users per day!

May, 2007
Personal differences brought Susi to leave DS and open her own site.
Pelin, Nayyan and I created the director team and with long meetings on MSN we got DS on the right way and improved little things.

We integrated joomlafish, a component which allows you to translate everything! That was perfect for joomla but not for the forum and the gallery *lol* - so there we stuck.

June, 2007

Because of personal problems Pelin had to leave her home and also the director team, she couldn´t find time anymore.
After having login problems and 100s of users writing us we felt that it was time for a last but biggest make over. Also Nayyan and I decided that we are a good team and two are enough ;-)

July, 2007

At the end that was a mistake. The design was great - it´s theme "Vintage Hollywood". But we got a new forum and a new gallery and hours before our site rally should start and our users came in for a big reopening we found us still fixing things because the programmer we had these days...well...another story.
Nayyan and I went crazy, we worked around the clock - when it was night in Germany she was up in Miami till late to controll what was happening and then I came back from sleep and we went on.
To make a long story short and let you know that we got some new grey hairs I can tell you that we reopened our site at the time we promised!!!!!


Our site rally was a big success and also the improvement that english people could see english things and german german things helped our users a lot to find their way around - at least we didn´t get complaints anymore ;-) and all had fun with a big site rally...

September, 2007

We fixed some things, added a chatroom, some new options to the store and it seemed for the first time the site was just running....we focused on advertising.

Oktober, 2007

From Oktober, 1st - 5th I left the site for the first time - more or less...I wonder what I expected but I was really afraid that something would happen when I was gone *lol*. Of course nothing happened and Nayyan made a great job!

Oktober 25th, 2007

So now all seems to come to an end for a short time...our database couldn´t be saved and yes, our it is gone.
we need to start again...all work is gone for now. but as i said - we look very positive into the future. for us dsg is like a home on the internet....our home, our site - there where our friends are.
don´t you think that are enough reasons to restart? yes, they are - right now our server will be installed again and tomorrow i get up early and start rebuilding our site.
some designers of our great team offered us help and prepared their kits again for upload. so you see - as a team you can move a lot.

we will do our best to make a big reopening soon! but as you can imagine there is a lot to do - for news look here, on the site´s blog (thanks to google that it isn´t gone *lol*)
or on nayyan´s personal page.

hugs to all of you!

....and think positive :-)

Before I forget - here is a little gift for you, a quickpage created with my last summer days kit you will find on DSG very soon!
Or find it here (on sale right now)

Click here and leave a comment for me! Thank you!!!