They say there's no such thing as a free lunch and that you get what you pay for.  Sometimes with free scrapbooking sites the same can be true.  You can find some great ideas and even templates and downloadable forms for your own scrapbook pages, but usually the things you find useful on these free scrapbooking sites are few and far between.  Often you need to sift through many blank templates that are not decorative at all before you find ones that are useful and that work well on your own pages.

One of the reasons for this of course is because there are many businesses that sell scrapbooking supplies including pages and templates, so of course they don't want to give too many things away on these free scrapbooking sites.  Most scrapbooking websites prefer to sell some products as well, so of course they can't give away all their products for free.  Usually the offer of free products is done just to entice potential customers to the site so that they'll purchase the other items.

This doesn't mean that you can't find anything useful in free scrapbooking sites.  Most do have templates and designs you can download or copy.  The real key to getting the most out of these free scrapbooking sites is to use those that have forums and boards for those who want to share their own experiences with scrapbooking, and where they can post photos of their completed pages.  While you don't want to copy these pages completely or exactly, you can get a lot of inspiration when it comes to the theme, layout, decorative elements, placement of photos and other items, and even the wording and lettering used for the wording.  You might see a very nice page that centers around a baby picture that doesn't look too silly or fancy and want to try your hand at something similar or see how a wedding page is laid out and feel inspired to try the same.