By now, you’ve probably seen the new NextProof control panel design. This weekend, we also added to additional updates.

Improved customer order emails

We’re now sending HTML emails to your customers after they place an order. The emails are much easier to read and include better details on their purchases.

Gallery and image sharing options

Visitors to your galleries can now share the gallery–or their favorite image–with friends and family. Sharing is an option that can be turned on/off for any gallery (it’s off by default for your existing galleries).

Once turned on, a “share this gallery” link will allow visitors to email a link to the gallery to a friend or family member. When viewing an image, a “share this image” link will allow them to email a link to that specific image (a thumbnail is included in the email).

Sharing will help event guests spread your galleries to other friends and family members.

Thanks for the feedback, there’s more to come

A special thanks to all the NextProof users who comleted our brief survey. The positive comments are much appreciated and we’re taking every suggestion and feature request seriously.

There’s more great updates coming soon.

This week we’ll be releasing an update to the NextProof control panel. Most of the updates are cosmetic–but with them we are beginning to remove support for Internet Explorer 6.

Why are we doing this?

Internet Explorer 6 browser was released in 2001. IE 7 was released in 2006 and IE 8 is now available. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences.

What does this mean?

This does not mean NextProof will not work in Internet Explorer 6. It simply means we longer spend significant time testing our styles on this platform. Therefore, some styles and layouts may be broken in IE6.

What about my customer galleries?

IE6 support in your customer galleries will depend on the theme you choose. Some newer themes may have slight style issues. Again, this doesn’t mean your galleries will not work–some menu/layout items may simply look out of place.

Regardless of the theme you choose, if you have clients using IE6 we recommend you assist them in upgrading to a modern browser.

It’s time to announce the winners of our NextProof holiday sales contest. We were blown away by the amount of sales our users made over the holidays.

The following 3 photographers are being awarded some awesome prizes:

Highest Gross Sales: Hilary Helton (Helton Photography)

Hilary Helton is a Las Vegas portrait and wedding photographer. We love the baby and child galleries on her site.

Hilary had the most online sales during our contest–and for that she’s going to get a $1,000 gift card to B&H Photo. That’s going to buy a lot of Fuji Superia because–that’s right–Hilary shoots film.

2nd Place in Gross Sales: Classic Image Photography

Classic Image Photography is a wedding and portrait studio in North Hollywood. They were our 2nd place winner in terms of gross sales. For that, Classic Image will get a $250 print credit to Pro DPI.

Highest Sales for a Free Account: James Dvorscak Photography

We thought we should throw in an award for the people who don’t even pay us every month :) James Dvorscak is a wedding photographer in Austin, Texas and he’s got a great portfolio. James had the highest gross sales among free account users.

James will be receiving a $250 gift card to B&H Photo.

Congrats to the winners and all NextProof users for an incredible holiday season.

Just thought we’d give you all a peek at our new digs.

BIG Folio & NextProof Office Tour from BIG Folio on Vimeo.

If you’re ever in the area, be sure to stop in for a visit. Make sure to call ahead, because we might be up on the mountain.

In case you didn’t receive our email update, we’re conducting a great holiday promotion. We’ve put together a holiday page filled with tips, videos, and more. It’s all designed to help you boost your sales this holiday season.

Not only that, but we’re giving away some prizes to the photographers with the most sales and best images this holiday season. Check out the holiday contest page and send us your 5 best wedding and portrait images.

Custom gallery themes are live

We’ve just implemented a major update to the NextProof system. You can now create and edit a custom theme for your NextProof galleries. Match your website, blog, and brand with our extremely flexible templating system.

You can download and modify the default themes, purchase premium themes, have us modify a theme for you, or have an entirely custom theme built from scratch. Here’s the details:

• Visit the custom theme guide for help modifying themes and a video overview
• Visit nextproofthemes.com to download the default themes or purchase a premium theme

We’re experiencing intermittent issues with uploading new images this morning. We’re working on the issue right now and it should be resolved very shortly.

UPDATE: The issue has been resolved. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

ImagingUSA is just around the corner and we want to see you there. In fact, this will be NextProof’s first convention/tradeshow. We’ve done plenty as BIG Folio, but NextProof will have its own booth here.

We’d love to see you there–here’s a free pass to the ImagingUSA Expo. Print it out, visit, and come say “hello”. We may even have some t-shirts for you.

If you’re not a NextProof user, today is a great day to become one. Over at BIG Folio, we just released a new standard site with great NextProof integration.

We’re giving the site away free for the next 24 hours to anyone who signs up for a NextProof Pro or Max plan. We’re even extending the offer to free/standard account holders who upgrade.

Details here on the bf/stop. Don’t miss out.

We just rolled out a nifty little update for your galleries. When creating a new gallery, you can now include Black & White and Sepia options in the gallery.

When this is checked, the gallery will give visitors these options for any image/product. They’ll also get a nice little AJAX preview when selecting an option. You can see it in action here on one of my sample galleries.

If you have this turned on, any selected options will also be displayed in the order details (so pay attention).

In the future, we may expand this feature–allowing you to define your own options.

I was going to install some forum software on the site–to facilitate discussion and share upcoming gallery themes. Instead, I’ve decided to create a Facebook group (for the time being at least).

If you’re a Facebook user, join our group.

My profile is here as well.