I Love the industry that I work in.  Wherever I have an internet connection, I have with me a booming community of people overflowing with resources to help one another out – for free.

Free stock images, free fonts, free tutorials, free code, free apps.  Endless galleries to browse for inspiration and a constant stream of blog posts collecting the best of the web conveniently together for our collective convenience.

To those bloggers, those wonderful curator’s of our community’s commonwealth, I say Thank You. Thank you for all the “20 Professional Free Fonts” posts, all the “10 Amazing Free Premium WordPress themes” posts, and all those “How to deal with clients” posts.

And to the thousands of people who respond to WordPress forum questions, I offer my sincerest gratitude.  Thank you for explaining how to customize the WordPress Loop, how to setup Custom Post Types, and how to setup a conditional “AND” statement.  I would be lost in many thick books without you.

Here’s my own short curated list of blogs and other resources that I tap into again and again to fuel my professional fire.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Incredible blog full of useful articles and roundups.

http://www.blogingbloging.com/
Has a knack for offering the best free WordPress templates.

http://www.boagworld.com/
The king of the ring, Paul Boag, is a must-read.

http://www.dafont.com
Largest collection of free fonts on the net.

http://www.designbombs.com/
Keeps me in the loop of the best designs goin’ – pure inspiration.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/
Runner-up font site after dafont.com.

http://www.justcreativedesign.com/
Jacob Cass, rising star, shouldn’t be missed.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
A whole lotta this and that – great stuff.

http://www.tutoriallounge.com/
Learn all the professional techniques for Adobe Creative Suite.

http://www.youthedesigner.com/
A wonderful, well-rounded resource blog.

This could be a way of making an article more engaging and meaningful for the reader. Or it might just confuse readers. One thing is certain – With the rise of the iPad, the age of digital magazines has dawned. Publications have started to create their own apps, and the articles that are published through these apps will showcase similar design to that used in the printed versions of the magazines. But should they bring that same design into their official websites as well?

It hasn’t caught on with the mainstream, but some bloggers have started a trend referred to as “blogazines”. The Stray Muse provides a telling example. Here are three very different looking pages from the same website:

The Stray Muse – The Stink Eyebrow
The Stray Muse – What’s the measure?
The Stray Muse – Tongue Worms

Notice how each page has it’s own, very different, background image, layout, typography, etc. The header and comments areas remain similar to retain some cohesiveness, but otherwise each page is free to morph into whatever best suits the article. Instead of simply choosing a hero image to accompany the article, whole new designs are applied to each article to support the content. It’s an interesting approach, but is this something more websites should do?

What if this actually confuses readers? What if the reader looks at the entire World Wide Web as one giant magazine, and each website is like a new article in that magazine? With the speed that readers jump from site to site, maybe they prefer a consistent experience within any given site. Often, readers are just looking to skim and scan. Having to digest a new design on each page might actually be unwelcome.

What do you think? Should more website adopt the website-as-magazine approach?

On November 5th, 2011, I had the great privilege of presenting at WordCamp Toronto 2011. You can download my presentation slides or watch the video on WordPress.tv.

I spoke about unlocking the hidden, powerful features of WordPress to better organize a website’s content, and make it more intuitive for clients to add and edit content. I showed how to implement custom post types, custom taxonomies, and custom fields. I also demonstrated how to modify the WordPress menu and how to create custom user roles in order to fine-tune the user interface for the end client.

For some in the audience, these concepts were a bit outside their range, but for others, it was just what they needed to push their WordPress websites way beyond the blog. The positive feedback I received was much appreciated, so I’ll definitely like to speak again.

The plugins that I covered included:

• Custom Post Type UI  (by Brad Williams)

• Custom Taxonomy Columns (by Matt Van Andel)
• 
Coming Soon: Post Type Column Editor (by Pippin Williamson)

• Widget Entries (by Javier Márquez)
• Advanced Custom Fields (by Elliot Condon)

• Admin Menu Editor (by Janis Elsts)

• Capability Manager (by Jordi Canals)

• Admin Menu Tree Page View (by Pär Thernström)

• TinyMCE Advanced (by Andrew Ozz)

• Tiny Div Wrap
• WP 
Easy Columns (by Pat Friedl)

Here the goal is to present the key message of the homepage in a big, beautiful way, to really get your message across to the reader. The other pages of the website can be designed in a more traditional way, with a much smaller header area, since the main message has already been communicated.

Next time you’re designing a homepage, think of it as a poster, and make a stellar first impression on your readers!

It has now become quite common for popular websites to offer mobile visitors a separate mobile version of their site (e.g. mobile.nytimes.com or mobile.live.com). Google has advocated for this on their new instructional site, howtogomo.com. To be clear, these website will automatically direct mobile visitors to the mobile version of the website, so there is no need for mobile users to type in a different URL from what desktop users type in. It is also quite common to offer a choice on the bottom of each page to mobile users to revert to the non-mobile version of the site, just in case that is what they are familiar with and want to continue using.

So what’s different about these mobile sites anyhow?  What makes them mobile-friendly? Here are 6 important considerations:

1. No Zooming Required: Content is designed to automatically fit the width of mobile devices so there is no scrolling left and right needed.
2. Quick Loading Time: Minimized file sizes to keep site loading time to a minimum. Mobile Internet speeds can still be fairly slow, and many people have to pay for each kilobyte of data they download.
3. Simplified Navigation: Wide navigation bars just don’t fit on small screens. It’s better to stack navigation links vertically or store them in a drop-down list.
4. Optimized for Touch: Large buttons are best for thumbs and it’s critical that the site doesn’t implement anything that depends on a mouse cursor hovering above something. On touch-based devices, there is no mouse cursor.
5. No Flash: Adobe has discontinued support for Flash on mobile devices. Instead of using Flash, mobile-friendly websites use HTML5 and CSS3 techniques.
6. Easy Contact Information: Making it easy for visitors to find and tap your phone number, email address, and street address makes it easier for them to engage you while out and about.

Recently, an alternative approach to providing a mobile-friendly website has gained tremendous popularity amongst web designers. It’s called Responsive Design and is based on a concept called One Web. A longer form of it goes like this: “One Web. One site. Every User. Every Device.” It encourages the production of single websites that can morph their structure to suit both desktop screens and mobile devices equally well. This means that instead of having one domain name for your desktop website (yoursite.com) and another for your mobile website (mobile.yoursite.com), there is only yoursite.com, and the layout of that site changes depending on what kind of device is being used to access it.  If you visit http://bostonglobe.com/ on your desktop computer, try resizing your browser window to make it as small as an iPhone screen and you’ll see what I mean.

This method is nice because it will modify the site’s layout in real-time to fit the user’s browser size perfectly. That means it is useful not only for mobile users, but also desktop users, who might have their browser window set to any number of sizes. The major challenge with this method, however, is keeping file sizes and loading times to a minimum for mobile users. This is because large content designed for large screens is still downloaded to mobile devices with small screens, and then either hidden or re-sized. This may or may not be a real problem, depending on the type and size of the website being designed. If it looks like it could make for a slow experience for mobile users, then Responsive Design may not be the best solution for the project, and a separate mobile site can be developed instead to ensures the speediest loading times possible.

Regardless of the approach taken, the goals remain the same. Give all users an efficient, intuitive experience, no matter what device they’re using.

Photo Author: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/