Faster, Easier Downloads!

As many of you will know, for years I´ve been storing my kits and freebies at 4shared. It wasn´t the ideal solution as it was pretty slow but it worked well enough and I never had any complaints...until just a few months ago when 4shared altered my settings without informing me and then things started to get difficult. First of all I discovered that if someone wanted to download any of my recent freebies she had to ask my permission so I had to keep checking to make sure that my settings remained as I´d set them and not as 4shared would have them. Then things got out of hand when suddenly 4shared refused to allow anyone to download anything, including kits, without opening a free account. That´s when I started to look elsewhere for alternative storage ...and by that I mean free storage. As I´m sure most of you know, I don´t have a large commercial store. I only sell my own kits and don´t invite other designers to contribute. Designing digital scrapbook kits is, and always will be, just a hobby and not a money making concern. By that I don´t mean that it isn´t thrilling when someone likes my kits enough to take the trouble to purchase and download them. However, if I had to pay for storage there would then be the worry that the store wouldn´t earn enough to make it worthwhile, and anxiety and creativity don´t mix well. I spent hours searching for a suitable website and came up with absolutely nothing. It began to look as if I´d have to close my store. Then I did what I should have done right at the start and told Lajuana who had set up my store in the first place and is still very much involved with it. She immediately offered enough storage space on her own website to accommodate my entire collection including any future kits. I shouldn´t have been amazed by her generosity as she´s always been a good friend but I thought – and still think – that this kind offer went well beyond the bounds of friendship. To cut a long story short we decided to start with the freebies so for the past week I´ve been hard at work uploading all the zip files to the FTP for Lajuana to retrieve and create download links. In other words I just did the easy donkey work and Lajuana all the difficult stuff and I must say she made it really difficult for herself by creating not just simple links but the most beautiful and original download pages. Here are a few screen shots so that you can see for yourselves how creatively she designed them.

Don´t they look great?

By doing all this work on my behalf Lajuana has had to neglect her other duties so while she catches up on her other work we´ll be leaving the kit links for later. For the time being all my kits are still at 4shared and still available but sometime in the near future we´ll also be making these downloads faster and easier.

In the meantime, I hope you´ll enjoy downloading my freebies and taking a little time in the process to enjoy Lajuana´s unique download pages.

Thank you, Lajuana!