I've just updated this site to use a new skin designed by Joe Davis of http://i7media.net/i7MEDIA. I wasn't really dissatisfied with the previous design in general, it was pretty decent and in some ways it makes me a little sad to change from what had become so familiar to me. But the new design seems very clean and there is a lot of attention to detail that really looks professional and I think in some cases the new design improves the usability of the site.

The menu structure is very nice and one of the most striking elements of the design. But the usability improvements are the result of making things stand out more. For example people hardly seemed to notice the forum descriptions and posting guidelines in the old design. It is right there on the page but somehow it often goes un-noticed because it doesn't grab your attention, so the result is that people often post questions in the wrong forum or leave out information that is expected to be included. With the new design, the forum description/instructions really stand out and I anticipate it will be noticed better than with the old design. Notice also the nice attention to detail for the pager link styles.

New Design Forums

Old Design Forums

Similarly, on our search page there has always been a little help link that people could click to learn how to do more advanced searching, but in the old design hardly anyone ever noticed it. Whereas again in the new design it really jumps out and I anticipate more people will click the help link and will have better luck searching once they know the tips from the help.

New Design Search

Old Design Search

A huge thanks goes out to Joe Davis for his hard work on this design! Joe is also working on a variation on this design but with a different color scheme that we will ship with a future release of mojoPortal.

What do you think? Do you like the new design better than the old one?

Please also let us know if you notice any pages on this site that don't look right with the new design, we are still tweaking a few things here and there.

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