Remember that feeling, walking home from school when all of a sudden you spy a treasure! A gem! A little ray of sunshine that you just have to share with the rest of the world! For me it used to be rocks and brightly colored leaves. I'd run home with my little prize and tumble in the house with glee. Thankfully my mom was good at faking the wonder and awe. Or like when you got a gold star sticker on your spelling test. It's amazing how that tiny scrap of shiny sticky paper could make you feel.

Every now in then in my wandering in the Internet world I find that gem! That treasure! So I'm like to share my little digital rays of sunshine and give my own Gold Stars.

Gold Star for Functionality and User Experience -

Ravelry

Ravelry is a social networking site for knitters, crocheters and fiber crafty people. You have all the normal social networking tools such as profiles, friend lists, endless forums and user groups. But Ravelry outshines every other website ever created. EVER.

I am not saying that just because I have a passion for knitting and spinning. Looking at the website from a new media marketing perspective and functionality stand point, it surpasses any other website I have ever encountered. How can that possibly be? Simple - it was designed for a specific target audience, to meet that audience's specific needs in a unique and very satisfying way.

If you are engaged in any sort of craft or hobby, you have tools and supplies busting out of closets and storage places everywhere. Knitters are world renown for accumulating a "stash" - a ever growing and unruly stockpile of yarn. Ravelry has custom designed its interface to help you catalogs and organize all your supplies. You can enter you "stash", your yarn supplies, noting where you purchased it, the color family, the number of skeins or balls, and the total yardage you have. You can enter you needles (the hardware) and even download your currently inventory of supples to Excel. You can create your own library of the books you own and it will hotlink to the exact patterns.

Ravelry should get another Gold Star for seamless cross platform integration. You can link to your blog hosted on other sites such as Blogger and link specific blog posts to individual projects. You can connect your Flickr or Photobucket accounts and link to pictures of what you've created. All this functionality is compounded by searchable databases of half a million users or so.

Let me walk you through the power of this experience.

Let's say you find a very cute sweater in the latest issue of Interweave Knits and it calls for 10 skeins of Malibrigo yarn. You don't have Malibrigo but you think you might have enough of another similar yarn (let's say Dream in Color). You can search for the pattern on Ravelry and it will list the recommended yarn including the yardage needed, needle size, size the pattern is offered in. You will see links to online shops that sell that yarn right there on the pattern page. You can then search everyone else who has made that sweater using your alternative yarn. You can see pictures of the final product, see if it looks good on someone with your body type, read pattern errors, go to the forum for that sweater and learn how other people modified it, ask questions if you don't understand the instructions and even contact the designer for help. Or simply, you have a skein of handdyed Holiday Yarns Candy Cane sock yarn and you just want to see how the color pools when its knitted, you can search for finished products made with that yarn.

Recently, Ravelry has added some great marketing features. If you own a shop or sell your own patterns, you can directly downloadable from Ravelry. You can create ads and sponsor groups and forums.

The shocking thing about Ravelry is that it is a three person (and one dog) operation and they were in the black in under three years with exclusively word-of-mouth advertising. And they are still technically in beta with a week long waiting list to join.

Ravelry is the most powerful tool in the Knitiverse. If you are a yarn shop owner and you are not taking advantage of Ravelry, you simply will not exist.