We would like to take this opportunity to firstly thank each and every one of you for bearing with us over the past week. A website launch is not an easy task to undertake and with such a small team on-board, we are doing our very best to work through your queries as quickly as possible.

It was necessary to relaunch our website to future-proof it in many ways – our old forum was on the verge of breaking and our site was starting to slow down, so to guarantee it working for many more years to come, we needed to transfer it over to a new platform.

We are very thankful for all of your feedback and despite being a small team of editorial, marketing and website developers we are working around the clock to get the features you all have loved and enjoyed over the years working and most importantly, building on their success by incorporating new features and functionality.

Change always throws up a few hiccups and despite over a year’s work in the making and extensive research, there’s always bound to be a couple of minor things that will change or evolve. Catering for our loyal customers is one thing, but we are also trying to encourage as many new people to the hobby and profession for many years to come, so it means enhancing some of the layout for mobile and changing features to reflect a more socially and active online audience.

So with that in mind, we wanted to round-up a couple of the bugs you have very kindly helped us eliminate and items missed so you can get stuck in…

• Gallery limitation to four per day – complete
• Comments missing on the gallery - We believe that all comments were imported from the old website. If you believe you have a gallery item with missing comments then please post a link to the gallery and we shall investigate and fix.
• Previously deleted images are no longer showing in your gallery
• Gallery search now includes an improved experience when searching for an artist name
• Missing Latest Forum Latest post panel on small screen devices – this was at the bottom, but we have since moved this to the top. On desktop, we have moved to the left to make it easier for you.
• Forum appearing as new member - The forum ranking system is based on criteria such as number of posts, this means you can be a long standing member of the forum but only classed as a new member if you only have a small number of posts. A breakdown of the ranking structure will be added at some point in the near future.
• Forum photo overlapping text – fixed
• For sale banner – now made smaller
• Delete items from My Art and being able to access your work on the gallery – fixed and now select “View” to see the comments and details in the gallery
• Studio wall – you can now delete items off the board that you made in error. Also, now corrected to “Hang on Studio Wall”
• Changed the for sale button colour for users not signed in
• Gallery comments now sorted in ascending order

We did take the decision to remove the number of views per image functionality, it wasn’t actually used or beneficial to as many users as you may think, but despite that we have decided to work on adding that feature back into the website, it will take a little bit of time as the data is all a bit of a mess. But we promise to try and get that back on as soon as we possibly can!

Unlike many websites, we do manage everything all in-house to ensure we offer our customers the very best service we possibly can.  One thing that was completely unprecedented was the sheer volume of customers who had a duplicate account, meaning they were unable to follow our upgrade procedure.

The procedure was implemented so we could get all users logging in and retain their historic gallery uploads and forum posts, so it is necessary to follow if you want to retain that.  Our subscriptions team have been busy working behind the scenes to resolve all the issues so for those of you who previously saw an error message, please try this again one more time to gain access to your account and reset your password here:

www.painters-online.co.uk/upgrade

If this fails again, please be assured that an automatic email is firing to our team who are working around the clock to sort each individual account issue.  If this is affecting you, please bear with us a few more days until we have a clear inbox.

Now over to reflecting on the new features…

We are absolutely delighted that many of you are enjoying our free trial.  Just to clarify, the free trial is to our new Studio membership service.  All of the existing features that you have enjoyed over the years (Gallery, Forum, Articles) will continue to be completely free of charge to use, Studio is something new that we have produced to keep with demands of technology and advancements in online tutorials.

Most importantly, Studio is to help you and our future generation, evolve your skills and help you become a better artist. Here is some of the great things that it has to offer:

• Studio Wall feature: You can hang all of your favourite content and inspirational gallery items to your Studio Wall to not only make it easier to revisit, but to help you formulate ideas for your next piece of work.  You can now edit, delete and rename boards as often as you please to keep up with your ever-developing skills. We encourage you to start sharing your boards and following other artists to build on this, Dawn and Sally have put together a board you can follow just here: https://www.painters-online.co.uk/studio-wall/painters-onlinet/
   
• Studio Archive: We have already uploaded 5 years’ worth of searchable articles and magazines from The Artist magazine to our Studio Archive. We are adding Leisure Painter and will continue adding all future issues to help you keep up to speed with the latest trends.
   
• Studio TV: We have already uploaded two exclusive videos to our new TV channel which we will be adding to and building on each month.  You are guaranteed to see a new video each month and we will be working hard to add even more over the next six months.
   
• Sell your art:  You can now advertise your art for sale on the website and invite users to visit your profile to enquire about the work you are selling. We have toned down the for sale banner in line with your feedback, so now it is flagged underneath the works rather than as a banner across the work.
   
• Studio+ - This is a premium version of Studio which includes all of the same great services plus a monthly copy of either The Artist, Leisure Painter or both! It includes a goody bag for all new customers worth a whopping £65! Some of you have already taken advantage of this fantastic deal and your bags will be in the post within the next 30 days.

Read about our features and how to benefit from your free trial here

In addition to the paid membership features, we are also going to be improving our Tips & Techniques section over the weeks and months to come.  The free Tips on the website will details on the paints used, a list of products to use and better images to help you benefit from the step-by-steps given.  We have also improved the Community section to make it easier to search for Workshops, Courses, Tutors and more. Plus, we’ve introduced a “like” heart on our gallery submissions (similar to how social media works) to build kudos.

Book reviews are also being added and it is now easier to search for books and products than ever before! All recommended books, content and features will appear under all the news, reviews and Tips across our site to help you further your knowledge.

All in all, it has been a very successful week and we hope over the weeks' and months' to come, you will enjoy all the very best that PaintersOnline now has to offer. We want to build a online community and we urge as many of you to follow and share ideas on our forum, through our Studio Wall feature and on our gallery.

If you have further feedback unrelated to your account login issues, please can we kindly ask that you send only to the following email address [email protected] 

Keep up the amazing work and a huge thank you to you all,
The PaintersOnline Team