"Pictures" page in member area was redesigned. The page can now be used to edit full details (name, description, art, style, etc) of up to 50 pictures at once. We also added "Favorite" flag for images. You may set this flag for all your artworks that you prefer to display on the Art-3000 front page and other site pages which display randomly selected images.

In addition to the home page, we now feature artists on different browse pages, for example, browse abstract art, browse impressionism and others. This increases artists' chances to be featured - if not on the home page, then at least on browse pages.

Artists page can display now a list of artists from certain country and/or artists that have art-works of certain form of art, style, genre or media.

We broke art styles into three different categories: art form (painting, sculpture, etc), art style (realism, abstract, etc) and art genre (landscape, portrait, etc). All pages, including search and browse pages, were modified to support new categories.

A few minor features were added to the site:

• Artists can now display their photo on the artist's main page.
• City and State fields were added to personal information.
• It is now possible not to display random images on the artist's main page.

Registered users now have access to image views report page. This page shows how many times each active picture has been viewed this month. Please note that our report shows actual image views, and not page views! This results in more accurate, albeit lower, view counts.

You can now view artworks of featured and new artists directly on your iGoogle home page:

Artists can now change the order of pictures in any online gallery and/or the order of all pictures.

This week's new site features:

• "Featured Artists" column on the home page was renamed to "Random Artists", and we added real "Featured Artist" section that displays 4 random works of the same artist for 12 hours.
• We enabled image protection for all high-resolution pictures. This feature can be disabled in member area.
• It is now possible to browse all artworks by media.
• Browse by style and media page displays all pictures in random order, thus giving everybody equal chance to be displayed on the first browse page. This order changes every 9-10 hours.
• We now have RSS feeds for new pictures artists and new artworks.
• Search by picture of the search page can be limited by style and media.

We've made two small changes to our gallery:

• You can set custom URL alias for any of your galleries. This works only if you specified URL alias for your artist page.
• Artist pages allow visitors to browse artist's works by media type. "Browse by media" links won't be displayed if all artworks either don't have media type specified, or have the same one media type set.

Registered users can now create up to 10 galleries. These galleries are convenient when you want to group artworks that are in some way related to each other. For example, you may want to create galleries for your early artworks, your favorites, etc. It is not yet possible to re-arrange the artworks within galleries - we're planning to add this feature by the end of February.

We updated design of the front page and changed site color scheme. Now all pages have dark gray background, which, in our opinion, improves visual appearance of the gallery and artworks. Later this week we're planning another site update - registered users will be able to create multiple galleries.

You can now specify URL alias for your account in member area. This option allows you to change your artist URL from "http://www.art-3000.com/artist/?id=<your_id>" to more professionally looking "http://www.art-3000.com/artist/Your_name/". Please see this page for more information.

Since we don't have much space on the home page to display many new artworks, we added new pages just to promote new artworks, as well as to promote the art of new members of Art-3000 gallery.

We added Search page to the site. By default this page can look for artist or picture name, or you can opt for deeper search, which will look inside "About artist" and "About Art" text when you search for artists, or inside of picture descriptions when you look for pictures.

Registered users now can use this page to request their username or temporary password to be e-mailed to them. We also fixed a rarely occurring problem with the login page where under certain conditions the page won't accept valid username and password.

All artists pages and picture pages now have a special link that allows site visitors to contact the artists. If desired, this feature can be turned off in member area.

We added "Browse by style" pages. You can browse all paintings or photos, or, if you want, you can browse by specific painting or photo style. Unfortunately, not all art-works have styles specified, so we wanted to ask all registered artists to update styles for their pictures.

All previously posted Call for Artists entries are now available on the Call for Artists archive page.

We've made more changes to the site:

• Artists can now switch to viewing and editing of their private (stored) pictures directly from their main artist page.
• It is now possible to change picture title and public/private status of the picture from the picture page.
• The layout of the "Edit picture" page was changed. As a result editing of picture information is now easier and can be done faster.
• Member area now includes links to "Edit public picture" and "Edit private (stored) picture" pages.

Artists can now specify style, media and year for their pictures. To do this please login as a member, go to your artist page and click on a picture you want to edit. Click on the "Edit" link in the top-right corner of the image page, and you'll be able to select style and media, as well as specify the year. Also, after you go to the "Edit" mode you will stay in this mode when you click on the "First", "Prev", "Next" and "Last" navigation links on the image page.

We added new features to the site:

• You can delete pictures. Pictures will be marked as "deleted" for one week. If you do not un-delete the pictures in one week then they will be physically removed from the site.
• You can specify description, size and price for your art-works. To do this login as a member and go to any of your pictures. You'll see "Edit" link in the top-right corner of the page. Click on it, and the page will allow you to change picture description, size and price.
• Most of the site was translated to Russian language. You can switch between English and Russian versions of the site using pull-down menu in the top-right corner of any page.

We're planning to add new features to the site in the next few weeks. It will be possible to delete pictures. Artists will be able to specify more information about themselves and their pictures. We will also offer Russian version of the site. We hope that having multi-lingual site will help us to attract more artists from other countries and make the site more interesting.

The biggest news is that our art gallery is finally online. While the gallery doesn't have many features right now, we're planning to add new features in the near future. Our goal is to make Art-3000 unique - make it a free community of artists, and not just another gallery site that sells artist pictures.