Sounds like you've been talking to people who don't know much about computer-scrapping! Well my dear...you have come to the right place!
You can achieve beautiful pages...that don't look tacky. And...even if your printer isn't that great or your pages fade...you can ALWAYS reprint them later!
I have an article coming out in the Nov. ezine about how to achieve that "hand-scrapped" look. There are tons of papers and elements in our elements section to replace buying expensive papers and stickers that you can't reuse.
What program are you using? I would highly recommend checking out the tutorials section. There are tutorials for "how to create a basic page" with every program.
Post lots of questions here...that's what we are here for.

I'm so sorry to hear about your daughter. Digital scrapping is going to be a great way to preserver all those precious memories you have of her.