Feature Set:  

Site:

Another established site, Shabby Princess has been around since 2004. Overall, the site is visually appealing and well organized. We noticed that the online newsletter is outdated by about three months but this doesn’t seem to have affected the other aspects of the site which all appeared to be current. One other minor irritation was the site owner’s use of the smiley icons within the text of various pages. It looks a little juvenile and interrupts the flow of reading but isn’t a huge issue.

Community:

The Shabby Princess site’s community is made up of a blog, user’s gallery, Monday night chat, emailed newsletters and forums. The site also has a nice selection of tutorials, most of which deal with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements but there are a couple for altered items and also one for using Digital Image Pro.

Store:

The store section of Shabby Princess is called the Shabby Shoppe. A nice feature of the store is how the user views the larger image of the thumbnails on the product pages. Clicking on the thumbnail produces a pop up window with a very large image of the thumbnail. Beneath the image is a navigation bar that allows you to view an automated slide show of the various images of that product or click through the images at your own pace, email the image link, open the image in its own window/tab or close the pop up. The images are very nicely done and certainly large enough to see the details of the product. Another thoughtful feature that comes with each product purchase are the contact sheets. These are especially helpful as your collection of digital elements grows because they make finding individual files much easier. Simply print a copy of the contact sheets as a reference and you’ll be able to flip through the sheets much more quickly than searching the numerous files on your computer.

Elements in the Shabby Shoppe:

• New Products
• Digital Kits
• Digital Papers
• Piece-a-Cake Albums (quick album page kits)
• Embellishments
• Miscellaneous (alphabets, wordart, dimensional/hybrid projects, cards, specialty albums, brag books, calendar covers, paper crafts, rub-ons)
• BLOGwear (blog graphics)
• Gift Cards ($3-$50)
• Shabby Steals (clearance/sale items)
• Calendars
• Commercial Licenses