I started in early 2004. I'd been adding text to photos to remember what my then 4-month old was doing in each photo, but as he got a bit older and did more I found myself wanting to capture longer stories than I could with a few words of text. My first layout was hybrid, and by the second I was all digital. In the early days I was active at Scrapbook Bytes and used Photo Impact to scrap. There was very little available to buy back then--a few people sold CDs with kits, but we didn't have online stores like we do now. I wasn't ready to invest in one of the CDs yet, so I downloaded a few freebies that community members shared (I think that's where the rivet came from) and made everything else (badly!) in my software. That's why everything took so long--we did a lot more by hand, adding things like ink and distressing ourselves in our software. Some of the first people I remember buying from were Gina Cabrera and Shabby Princess. When online stores started I still had dial up. I used to set up downloads to run overnight, and even though they were tiny by today's standards they took hours and hours. I remember seeing all the ads and teasers for SSD before it opened. I visited on opening day and sometimes after that, but I think it was couple of years later that this became my digital home.
Here's my first digital layout:
I had some of the kits in the layouts above--good memories!
Some early sites I remember:
Scrapbook Bytes
The DigiChick
ScrapGirls
Digital Design Essentials (Gina Cabrera)
Designer Digitals
Scrapbook Graphics
Funky Playground Designs (or something like that)
Elemental Scraps
Shabby Princess