Thanks to our friends at DM2 Creative and i7MEDIA, mojoPortal.com now has a much nicer new design. Mark Asquith and the talented team at DM2 Creative came up with the design and Joe Davis of i7MEDIA did the conversion from a .psd file to a mojoPortal skin and also did lots of styling work for the features. I really love the new look and can't thank those guys enough for their great work. I hope you like it too!

Many of you may already know that I am not a designer myself, though I'm a pretty good mechanic when it comes to CSS and I can implement designs that others come up with, I lack any talent for creating designs from scratch. I'm just a developer, I can make it work well but I can't make it pretty, I need others to help with that.

The previous skin that we've used for the last 4 months or so was really something that Joe Davis had only intended as an example skin we could ship with mojoPortal, he never intended it to be the new design for mojoPortal.com, but I liked it and thought it was time for a change since the design we had before that was just some free design I had found on the internet. But after the change we got lots of complaints and only a few people said they liked it and I began to realize that not only am I not a good designer, I'm not really even a very good judge of design. However, I really did not want to go back to the previous design so I asked Joe and Mark to help, and this new design that we've launched today is the result of their awesome help.

Again huge thanks to Mark Asquith and his associates and to Joe Davis for making this site look great!

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This month's mojoPortal sightings includes the ChurchTeams.com site designed by TRIAD Communications, as well as the TRIAD Communications site itself which they have recently re-done using mojoPortal.

TRIAD Communications, based out of Cuyahoga Falls Ohio, has done quite a lot of really nice designs with mojoPortal and we've featured some of their sites before. 

Also this month we'd like to highlight Aquest IT based out of Greensboro, NC. They also have done quite a few sites with mojoPortal including their own.

They also implemented 99Blocks Magazine, Downtown Greensboro's Magazine.

Greensboro is not far from mojoPortal headquarters here in Charlotte, NC, so it is nice to see designers nearby using mojoPortal, and a good testament to mojoPortal to see design firms that not only use mojoPortal for their customers but also for their own sites.

We'd love to hear about the sites you are bringing online with mojoPortal. If you have a high profile site or a design that you're particularly proud of, or a site showing custom features you've built on mojoPortal, let us know, maybe we'll feature your site(s) in a blog post.

Don't forget if you haven't already, please vote for mojoPortal in the 2011 Open Source CMS Awards. Thanks to your nominations we are a finalist and now we need your vote.   

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Thanks to your nominations mojoPortal is a finalist in the 2011 Open Source Awards in the Open Source CMS Category!

That means we've made it to the next phase of the contest which is voting, so now we need your vote! The competition is very tough every year and the finalists are all excellent contenders with larger communities than ours which makes it easier for them to get votes, so we are definitely the underdogs in this contest and we really need as many of our community members to vote for mojoPortal as possible. The voting phase is open from now until October 31, 2001, then the judges weigh in and the final winners will be announced on November 7, 2011. I know that voting seems like the same thing as nominating but nominations were just the first phase. Thanks to you we got enough nominations to make it to the finals but voting is even more competitive and we need your support now more than ever! So go vote for mojoPortal today!

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This month's mojoPortal sightings were submitted by Mark Asquith of dm2 Creative.

Fitrite.info one is part of Sash UK, one the the UK's largest window manufacturers.

The new site for Altogether Better is helping them win a UK Prime Minister's Big Society award. Using mojoPortal, dm2 Creative was able to design, build, and launch this site all within one week!

We'd love to hear about the sites you are bringing online with mojoPortal. If you have a high profile site or a design that you're particularly proud of, or a site showing custom features you've built on mojoPortal, let us know, maybe we'll feature your site(s) in a blog post.

Don't forget, if you haven't already, please nominate mojoPortal for the 2011 Open Source CMS Awards. Nominations are open until September 9, 2011 and we need as many nominations as possible to become a finalist and make it to the next stage of the contest.

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Hello mojoPortal Community, its that time of year again and Packt Publishing has started their annual Open Source Awards and with your help we'd like to compete in the Open Source CMS Category.

The first stage is the nomination stage and it requires a lot of nominations to get to the next stage which is voting, so we need your nomination. Please head on over to the Open Source CMS Nomination page and nominate mojoPortal! The competition is very tough every year so every nomination counts. 

The schedule for the contest is:

August  1 | Nominations Open
September 9 | Nominations Close
September  19 | Voting Begins
October 31 | Voting Ends
November 7 | Winners Announced

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