Today we’re going to something a little different on our blog and if you’re a designer looking to join the popular dribbble scene… Well, today is your lucky day! I’ve got 1 invite to giveaway to 1 lucky designer who thinks you’ve got what it takes. I thought it would be fun to put together a little competition to find the deserving designer so let’s jump right to it.

Here’s the scoop on the Dribbble Invite Contest:

To enter this contest we’re just asking for 3 simple things. The first one is to follow us on twitter and like us on Facebook. Secondly, post a “shot” (400×300) and a link to your portfolio in the comments section below. Lastly, we need you to share the contest by getting your tweet on. See below:

Tweet the following → Win a Dribbble invite from MOJO! Contest here: http://bit.ly/xQsLLi #dribbble #contest (Pls RT)

That’s it. At the *end of the week, we’ll declare the winner! Good luck!

(*PLEASE NOTE – This contest has ended. Congrats @meepixels)

Today we’re excited to highlight our new featured seller on MOJO Themes. He goes by the name of MageTitan and has been the driving force behind a new category, Magento Extensions.

Below is a quick interview of this months featured seller: MageTitan. Check out their portfolio → MageTitan Extensions.

1. The basics, tell us about yourself.

My name is Michael Potter. I have been seriously programming for around 15 years now, but playing with code for most of my life. My first real program was written when I was 10 years old, so I’m truly a geek at heart. I’m fluent in PHP, Ruby, and have used many more while consulting. When off the job, I’m a dad of two boys, and also officiate Lacrosse and Soccer.

2. Did you teach yourself everything? If not, were there mentors or schools involved?

I started as self-taught in many different languages, but have some formal training, as I graduated from Utah State University.

3. What programs do you use for everyday programming?

Currently, when programming, my development environment consists of a Mac with Text Mate on one screen, and Chrome and Firefox on another. On occasion, I’ll bring up Windoze on a virtual environment when needed to browser test.

4. Why do you love working with Magento and what would you recommend to the average developer looking to get into developing with Magento?

Magento has been the best PHP Framework I’ve used. They have done an outstanding job in creating an extendable environment. Having used Zend in the past, it was easy to understand. Unfortunately, it takes a good deal of time to fully understand the framework, and it is not well documented, so get ready to look through a lot of core code when first learning to extend the system.

5. Tell us about some killer Magento items you have coming soon to MOJO.

Coming soon to MojoThemes Magento Extensions from MageTitan: Product Based Shipping Rates, Order Followup, Delete CC Info, Address Validation, and MORE!

Thanks for the time MageTitan team, we’re looking forward to more extensions from you! Welcome to MOJO!

Exciting times around here at MOJO as we’ve been hard at work putting together this years 2nd annual MOJO Cyber Bundle. It’s that time of the year again where we celebrate the Holidays with our users by offering a LIMITED TIME bundle deal that lasts 7 DAYS ONLY. Oh and trust me, this years bundle won’t let you down.

Again, this years Cyber Bundle only lasts 7 days and includes a whopping 15 WordPress themes valued at $515. We’re practically giving it away since you can snag this deal for ONLY $29!!!

What are you waiting for? This bundle is only available for 7 Days. Get it before it’s gone! → BUY NOW

Last week felt like the week that would never end. Starting Wednesday, we started having issues with our site that were directly related with our current (soon to be previous) hosting providing. With everyone on our team working fast to resolve the issue, making sure to stay on top of notifying users and a spoon full of horrible customer service from VPS.net we were finally back up Friday night.

We wanted to write a quick post to say sorry about the issues many of your probably had to go through. Also, we wanted to tell you how much we appreciate your patience too. It meant a lot to see everyone be so understanding.

Here’s a coupon to make things rights:

Yep, that’s right, we’d like to offer everyone a LIMITED COUPON CODE to get 15% off any items on the marketplace.

During checkout, look towards the bottom left for our coupon box and enter this coupon code: MOJO15 and get 15% off! Thanks again for your patience during our unexpected down time!

Below is a quick glance into how great the month of September was for the marketplace. Also this is a big list because of all the great uploads we had from our $100 upload contest. And before we hop into this, we wanted to let you know, we saw our biggest growth (again)! Go MOJO!

New Marketplace Items:

Klix WordPress Theme – One of my favorite uploads from the upload contest. Not only is theme extremely unique it also is built the right way from the ground up and all whilst still packing all the features you’d see in all of our themes on marketplace.

Melee WordPress Theme – Melee is a minimalistic theme that features an unique design, suitable for any company or individual. It’s simplistic approach makes it a great choice for anyone who is looking for a highly customizable theme. It’s ease of use makes it a template suitable for both WordPress experts and beginners.

Easy WordPress Theme – Easy is a great responsive Magazine WordPress Theme that offers a clean design and neat code. The rich theme admin panel and widgets enable you to control over your content, manage your advertisment, show your latest tweet, video, photos and much more. It’s already climbed up our most popular list of themes in just a short time too!

Little Smile WordPress Theme – A sexy minimal design that offers a powerful a framework by this seller. His work is unique and you’ll notice once you fire up the live demo of this bad boy. Go head, fire it up, I know you’re curious now.

Cookie AJAX WordPress Theme – Cookie is a pretty smart, creative and easy customizable WordPress portfolio theme. You can easily build your portfolio in 5 minutes, presenting yourself with a cool and elegant animated intro.

Box – One Page WordPress Theme – Box One is a brand new one page WORDPRESS theme developed exclusively for Mojo Themes. It’s perfect for business or a personal users. It’s incredibly powerful, flexible, and easy to use!

Presto WordPress Theme – Presto is a clean, elegant and easy to use WordPress theme. Includes nathrats new and improved admin panel, Presto is sure to please. This theme also sports a tooltip enabled slider allowing you to say more with your slides.

Impresso WordPress Theme – Impresso is a premium WordPress theme for small and large businesses that need a clean, professional, minimalist portfolio site with the amazing nivo slider. The portfolio section is simply beautiful, easy to use and each portfolio item can have 2 different styles of layout.

Metrolo WordPress Theme – Metrolo is a very powerful and clean WordPress theme suited for both the casual blogger who wants to get started right away and the advanced developer who wants to have complete control over his site design. Oh and it just hit the #1 spot on our most popular items list.

VertuLab WordPress Theme – Welcome to the VertuLab Corporate WordPress Theme! Be sure to check out the live demo to see all the features and functionality packed into this theme.

Complex WordPress Theme – Introducing Complex Modern WordPress Theme. This Premium WordPress Theme features a wide range of customization and backend features. Every single page and tiny section in this Theme is customizable.

Lorenz WordPress Theme – Lorenz is a stylish premium theme for WordPress, created especially for smart business and corporate websites. Its cleverly designed to exude a professional feel with its simple and clean layout. Whats more, Lorenz works straight out of the box, meaning you can use it on an already existing WordPress website without any additional setup or configuration.

The Corpoate WordPress Theme – Corporate is a premium WordPress theme ideally suited for corporate and personal websites and blogs. Here are just some of the features – 6 Sliders, 200+ Fonts, powerful custom admin panel, Translation Ready, 12 unique skins and ability to easily create new skins from scratch and huge amount of shortcodes, 12 Page Templates and much more.

Venducci WordPress Theme – Venducci, on its own, doesn’t need a lot of tweaking. It is already top of the line and certified world-class. Nevertheless, Theme Dutch has always been known to offer flexibility to all its customers. Thus, the Venducci theme is still packed with plenty of modification features.

Premium Website Templates

Pinnacle Website Template – Pinnacle is a modern and effective solution for your online portfolio. Whether you like to post detailed blogs to keep your clients up to date, or just showcase your portfolio, Pinnacle will do the job.

Wanderwall Website Template – Meet Wanderwall, a kickass one-page site template for all you photographers out there. Wanderwall is an ideal choice for photographers who have a lot of photos to showcase to the world. Hat tip to the seller of this theme, amazing work!

Wanderwall MINBIZ HTML5 Website Template – MINBIZ is a clean, minimal, premium HTML5 business template. MINBIZ comes with 6 different color schemes, and the home page includes a clean and smooth image slider. There is also a Mobile version available of this theme – MINBIZ MOBILE.

Evane HTML5 Website Template – Another dopetastic and delicously tasty HTML5 site template. Evane is a premium HTML5 theme suitable for portfolios, blogs and personal sites.

Dual Flow HTML5 Website Template – Dual Flow is a premium HTML template built using modern HTML5 and CSS3 techniques. This template features 20 page layouts, a filterable Portfolio and a working AJAX Contact form. This template is suitable for a portfolio site, but can be readily used for a Blog based or a Corporate website.

Gizmo – Marketing Landing Page – This HTML landing page template has been custom built from the ground up using the best practices in stand alone landing page design principles. There are a number of pre-built elements in various colors to choose from so you can quickly setup and customize your own professional landing page.

Popular Blog Posts this Week:

• $10,000 Giveaway of Marketplace Credits
• Restaurant WordPress Themes
• New Featured Seller: Theme Dutch
• Minimal WordPress Themes
• Buy WordPress Themes

Popular Forum Topics:

• Our next seller contest… WP-Ecommerce Themes????
• Is this your Hobby or Job?
• What’s your drink of choice when you’re hustling.

Before we get into the interview below be sure to checkout the full portfolio of Theme Dutch and also take a look at a few of their popular WordPress themes.

1. The basics, who are you, where do you live?

We’re Dutch and proud of it. Our team is composed of five guys and a gal. We live and work in Roermond, a city located south of the Netherlands surrounded by bodies of water and lush forests. Our place is a tourist-haven for watersport enthusiasts.

2. Where did you learn to design and develop killer themes?

I (Mike) have several years of experience in sales, marketing, web design and search engine optimization (SEO). My partner, Helen, was educated at the Design Academy, one of our country’s primer design school. Before joining Theme Dutch, she worked for several advertising agencies.

A year and a half ago, Helen and I discussed our future together. We wanted fun things to do. We did not want to look for more customers and have countless meetings for hours discussing project costs, etc.

What we wanted was freedom in our work and more time for designing, developing, and selling our own product. We both love and respect WordPress. We saw it as an opportunity to work full-time online and develop WordPress themes as the basis of creating a new company.

Fully designed themes with an added value and SEO, integrated with several sales and marketing tools are what we thought of. We believe that a website does not only need to look great, it should also be optimized in all aspects. A beautiful website that can’t be found in search engines is a bad investment.

Together, we brainstormed and came up with fresh concepts for themes and created additional value that processes sales, marketing and search engine optimization to the themes. We have a team of developers that develop our concepts to workable and easy to build themes. We love to blend Dutch design (minimalistic), high-end coding and passion for ‘flashy looks’ into completely customizable WordPress themes. We like to be a ‘fresh breeze’ in the theme market.

3. What are your favorite apps/programs to use when developing?

We mainly use Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver.

4. We have to see the work environment. Are you in an office or home? Mac or PC?

We work at an office. All team members use iMacs. The only time we get to touch a PC is when we test our themes to all major browsers and operating systems. We’re all Mac lovers.

5. What can you not live without when building themes?

While developing themes, we can’t live without music, a lot of coffee and candy, and our pets (two cats and a French bulldog). We also constantly challenge each other while on work.

Moreover, we always keep an eye on new developments and continuously learn from each other and our clients.

6. Do you have an advice or inspiration that can help a young designer/developer in the business?

Our advice is to stick to creative ideas, plan for the future and work hard to achieve your goals. Be critical of and keep improving yourself. Consider making themes for the end user, your website’s visitors or those of your clients. Always bear in mind that a website should help increase sales of a company and is not there for fun.

If you’re not familiar with this type of giveaway we’ve done in the past, what it means is that whenever there is a new signup we will deposit a FREE $10 in your account. No questions asked. If you were thinking of buying a WordPress theme you now only spend $20 on average! No need to worry about anything, get browsing now and go buy WordPress themes!

Here are the details:

• We have allotted $10,000 for this giveaway and will run it until the money is all spent!
• Each new account will be deposited $10. Unfortunately, this is only for new accounts.

Spread the News: Tweet This

GIVEAWAY: @mojo_themes is giving away $10,000 in marketplace credits! Signup here: www.mojo-themes.com/signup

Here’s the Details of this MOJO Seller Contest:

• Timeframe: Starts: August 30th, 2011 / Ends: September 19th, 2011
• Once your theme is accepted—you’ll receive payment via PayPal.
• Items uploaded must stay on the MOJO marketplace for at least 3 months.
• Items must be exclusive to MOJO Themes.
• If your submit using Joint Forces, we’ll split the $100 between your team members equally.
• This does not include PSD templates, landing pages, etc.

If you have any questions about the contest please don’t hesitate to ask. Also, please keep in mind our same upload requirements need to be met to earn the $100 dollars. We expect to see some top-notch submissions for this contest.

Good luck!
—
The MOJO Crew

We’re excited to announce our brand new seller commission rates for all of our hard working sellers. We feel these new rates are much more favorable to sellers. Hopefully these rates seem much more attainable and will give you more incentive to keep producing awesome themes!

Previous Commission Rates

Updated Commission Rates

Sellers, from everyone behind MOJO Themes, we truly appreciate you being a part of the community and selling on our marketplace. As we’ve always said, this place wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for all of you.

PLEASE NOTE: As of now, these new commission rates have been activated and new sales will reflect your new percentages. Here’s to higher commissions rates!

Between launching the new site, adding new features and everything else in between, we’ve done a poor job promoting it. No excuses though because frankly, there’s nothing else out there like it and we should make sure everyone’s aware of it.

For of those of you that don’t know, JOINT FORCES allows designers & developers to collaborate on their items. Essentially, you can “team up” with fellow MOJO users and upload the item to MOJO together. Simply add your team members usernames and our system will automatically split the commissions for you. As of right now, you can add 2 additional team members. Pretty cool huh?

We actually first launched this back in April of 2010 and thus far, we’ve had quite a few teams work together and upload some awesome items. See Cleaner, Chow and Incognito just to name a few but we don’t want it to stop there.

TEAM UP! If you’re interested in finding a designer or developer you should visit the JOINT FORCES forum. There’s plenty of talented users in the community. → Visit Forums.

SELLERS: Where do we go next?

Up until this point we’ve done our best to listen to what you guys wanted. We tried to build this out in it’s simplest form to help sellers collaborate with their unique skills and leave the boring stuff up to us.

For now, we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve to connect the sellers in a awesome way. It’s still in the works but should be worth the wait. Also, we’re going to do a better job of promoting JOINT FORCES throughout the site.

With that being said, what else can we do or add to this to make it better for you? After all, if it weren’t for you guys this marketplace wouldn’t exist so we’re all ears to improve for you.