Not content to settle for what's possible, Adobe has recommended some specifications to the W3C that will allow CSS to create much more fluid, flexible layouts.

The CSS Regions standard recently made its way into both the WebKit browser engine project and latest Chromium release, and will also be supported by Internet Explorer 10.

Another improvement to CSS proposed by Adobe is called Exclusions, which lets developers flow text into a non-rectangluar shape, or to wrap it around graphics on the screen, much like what's been possible in desktop publishing for decades. Check out the video below for examples of these new standards at work.

Between LAUNCH and DEMO, this last week has seen more than its fair share of startups. Among these companies, we've seen a number of DIY mobile app creation tools throw their hat into the ring and promise a world where getting your company into someone's hands is as simple as dragging and dropping a couple of buttons.

With all of these democratizing, empowering tools hitting the market, there's just one question - are we about to relive the era of <blink> tag text and marquee side-scrolling banner ads?

During this self-same era, I worked as a freelance web developer and designer and was therefor subject to all manner of requests. I turned down bids for veterinarians who wanted their website to bark and chirp at visitors and I regularly ignored requests for background music, mystery meat navigation and irrelevant weather widgets. I simply refused to plague the Web with such terrible design and, I feel, singlehandedly saved several hundred folks, at the very least, from visiting yet another site with an animated "Under Construction" GIF. That, I felt, was part of my job.

Since that era of multi-font, multi-color websites, however, we've seen a movement to standardization. Businesses, instead of creating their own online presence, have come to rely on sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp and any number of other online services. The restaurant manager and the veterinarian are no longer moonlighting as creative directors, they simply fill in the blanks and it all gets plugged into a user-friendly, uniform online presence.

If DIY, drag-and-drop mobile Web app creators are the future, however, then we may come full circle. We may return to the land of irrelevant features and terrible design just yet. These apps may handle the complex coding aspect of creating a mobile presence, but they don't teach the end-user the most important skills - design and user experience.

It all dawned on me when one of these companies got up on stage and showed off how quickly and easily anyone with a Web browser could create their own app. Look, they said. You can add a map. You're a restaurant - you can add your menu. And while your at it, why not add a tip calculator?

It is but a short mental leap from tip calculator to word find puzzles for the kids and trivia games for the whole family.

What do you think? Will the next generation of user-created mobile Web apps be the resurgence of the Geocities generation? Or is that beast well-contained and a relic of our folkloric past, only to be found in the dark corners of the Internet and in the archives of the Wayback Machine?

ZURB's founder and "Chief Instigator" Bryan Zmijewski

"To truly design around the needs of people, Verify blends both quantitative and qualitative feedback to help product teams make faster and more informed design decisions without having to fully implement ideas."

Among the tests available in Verify are a memory test, an A/B preference test and click tests, as well as a number of annotation-driven tests. Users who opt to pay for Verify Premium ($29 per month) also get access to demographic reports and the ability to link multiple tests together. Pricing for the service starts at $9 per month for accounts that don't offer these premium services. ZURB also offers a 30-day free trial.

With Verify, ZURB wants to give designers a toolkit that allows them to quickly verify specific ideas, but also gives them the ability to turn this feedback into actionable reports. It's important to note, too, that these tools are not so much meant to be used for usability testing, but for gathering design feedback and enabling product managers, design teams and marketers to quickly test ideas and make design feedback an integral part of the development process.

With Clue, ZURB focused on making the creating of these test as easy to use as possible. To get started, you just have to enter the URL of the site you want to test. Clue will take a screenshot of the site and return a link that you can then give to your test subjects. As ZURB's lead marketer Dmitry Dragilev told us, the tool is mainly aimed at small businesses and mom and pop stores, as well as designers who want to quickly test an idea. Given that you can't password-protect your test results, though, you probably don't want to use it for confidential tests.

Once you know what your visitors remember about your site, you can then work on tweaking your site to match what you actually want them to remember about you and your product.

Clue joins ZURB's constantly expanding range of tools like Bounce (our review), Notable and Verify.

What do You Remember About ReadWriteWeb?

If you want to give us some feedback, here is a link to a ReadWriteWeb screenshot on Clue. Give it a try and tell us what you remember about our site.

But give marketing - especially online marketing - its due. The same thing has happened with marketing that happened with video, audio and many other fields: tools that were priced far out of our reach only a few years ago are suddenly cheap (or even free) and readily available.

But there's a cautionary note to sound here. Case in point: if you're old enough to remember the advent of desktop publishing, then 1) I hope you can read this through your bifocals, and 2) you'll also remember the eyeball-searing newsletters and posters pumped out by folks who could read the PageMaker manual but didn't have a clue about design. (Sixty different typefaces on one page! Cool!)

The point is that a tool might be easy to use, but it isn't necessarily easy to use well. And reading even a few books about, say, analytics - I'm a fan of Avinash Kaushik's, for example - will put you head and shoulders above most of the rest of us.

And once you know how to use a tool well, you'll be in a much better position to use it (or when not to) to achieve the things that really matter to you, whether it's valuable business conversions or meaningful personal connections.

More Noise to Signal.

We thought it would be interesting to take another look at Martha Stewart's website, to get an indication of how mainstream websites have evolved over the past 3 years.

However if we look more closely, several things have taken more prominence on the site compared to 2007.

Martha's Blog

The first is an increased focus on Martha's personal blog. In 2010 Martha has a daily updated blog, called The Martha Blog, with the tagline "up close and personal." This marks a change from 2007, when the main blog was called Bluelines and was written by the editors of company magazine Blueprint. The Bluelines blog was shuttered in July 2008.

The Martha Blog was started in August 2007 and began to be regularly updated in October 2007. The content on the blog appears to be written by Martha herself, although one can never be sure with celebrities. Regardless, it showcases the power of blogging - which allows average people and celebrities alike to speak in a personal voice to the world.

There are other topic-focused blogs on marthastewart.com, including a light-hearted one authored by "Martha's two adorable French bulldogs, Francesca and Sharkey."

Twitter & Facebook

Of course, it's 2010 and so that means Martha has to have a Twitter account and Facebook Page.

Martha's Twitter account has nearly 2 million followers (1,909,707 as of today, including this author now). She seems to be a regular Tweeter, which is great to see. Many of the tweets are promotions of her TV show, but then we're all guilty of self-promotion (ahem). You can see that the tweets are genuine though, for example this one about a late guest on her show: "who could this person be?- so irresponsible when he/she knows the show is live at ten!!! it's 9:39 we are all apprehensive!!!! oh my."

TV Show Promotion

Another change from 2007 that we noticed was an increased tie-in with Martha's TV show. It is given prime real estate on the homepage of marthastewart.com, with previews of the latest show and links to the archive.

Despite the TV show being a big focus, the website doesn't have a lot of multimedia content on it. The videos that are on the site are largely promotional.

This section includes 'how-to' articles that complement the TV show, for example this article on how to make a Tie-Dye-Effect Scarf (as featured on a recent TV episode).

Evolution of Martha's Website

Martha Stewart's website is clearly meant to be a complement to her main media businesses, the TV show and magazines. So you won't find much ground-breaking use of the Internet - there's little or no original video produced specifically for the website, for example.

There also wasn't a lot of personalization, which was promised in 2007. The community functionality in 2010 seems much the same as in 2007: message boards and the blogs. Although, Twitter and Facebook are both being used to enhance community.

It'd be nice to see more Web native content and personalization. The Web isn't Martha's main media presence, so we can understand why those features are lacking. However traffic seems to be on the decline, so perhaps Martha's web team should consider upgrading again.

2010 Martha Stewart website

2007 Martha Stewart website

2005 Martha Stewart website

With support from Mozilla announced with the release of Firefox 3.6, and with the advocacy of leading type foundries such as Linotype, Emigre, and Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the question of web fonts might be satisfactorily resolved in the near future.

In a blog post, Mozilla contributor John Daggett wrote, "The WOFF format originated from a collabaration between the font designers Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming with help from Mozilla's Jonathan Kew. Each had proposed their own format and WOFF represents a melding of these different proposals. The format itself is intended to be a simple repackaging of OpenType or TrueType font data, it doesn't introduce any new behavior, alter the @font-face linking mechanism or affect the way fonts are rendered. Many font vendors have expressed support for this new format so the hope is this will open up a wider range of font options for web designers."

Of course, Firefox 3.6 will be the first browser to support the new format, so designers will need to include @font-face rules for other browsers, at least for the time being. Not surprisingly, creating such rules for Internet Explorer is more complicated than for other browsers, as IE only plays nicely with Embedded Open Type faces and a limited set of @font-face rule descriptors.

Internet Explorer wonkiness aside, WOFF is a widely supported and relatively prominent step in the right direction, and we hope more browser versions will support the format. It's about time for web pages to lose their homogeneity, for designers to gain more tools for brand and personal expression, for search engines to read more fonts, and for users to have richer browsing experiences.

Interested web developers and designers should also check out woffTools, a Python package for examining and manipulating WOFF files. This package also contains a set of command line tools for verifying and examining the files.

In this postmodern world, we're all professionally fragmented jacks of all trades, and few of us have the patience (read: OCD) for learning enough CSS and Flash to allow us to keep up with the Jonses in terms of functional, sexy web design. Here are some cheat sheets, the Cliff Notes of site creation, if you will. Read on to discover four awesome, in-browser resources for creating your own beautiful corner of the web without the horror of code.

YourOwn.com: Edicy offers free vanity.edicy.com domains and publishing to any domain the user chooses for about $8.50 a month.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Users can only pop the hood, so to speak, on HTML for sections of text. We couldn't find a way to, for example, change the color scheme or background image or page formatting.

SEO-riffic: Edicy lets users add keywords and descriptions, but not other metadata or tags for images or other media.

Zimplit: Fully Simple, Fully Editable

Zimplit is a resource we reviewed some time ago, but we feel it's perfect for this particular round-up. We were able to create a simple, elegant page within about a half hour. It's an open-source, dead-simple application that works just as well for code-free "dummies" as well as it does for those with an inkling or two about web design on the back end. For non-coders, a gallery of great design templates kick things off, and a simple 12-button toolbar does it all after that.

YourOwn.com: Vanity URLs on Zimplit.com are available, and regular domains (plus email addresses) are available starting at around $4.25 per month.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Users have complete access HTML and CSS for their pages, making this a great resource for learning as you go.

SEO-riffic: Sorry, Charlie. You'll have to access the code to tweak your metadata and keywords.

Wix: Flash Sites for Flashy Folks

We're not going to lie: Creating a Flash site in Wix will take you a little more time. But for those who desire that Flash-y touch, this is one of the best free resources you'll find. This editor will present tools familiar to those familiar with other graphic design programs such as image editing or more GUI-oriented website editing programs. The effects, behaviors, animations, and other options offer complete control. Also, we adore the horde of multimedia gallery options. You've got slide shows, Apple-like sliders, and tidy matrices. But to be honest and fair, Wix is just as strangely buggy as any Flash service you've tried to use.

YourOwn.com: There's a whole slew of premium options. Users can elect to choose their own domains for as little as $4.95 a month. An ad-free site, however, costs a dollar a month more.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: We couldn't see any back end here, folks. But with all the design options available through the Wix interface, we're not sure you'll need much more.

SEO-riffic: "SEO Friendly" options start at $4.95 a month.

Amplifeeder: A Catchall for the NMDs Among Us

Another site we've reviewed before is Amplifeeder. What users create there may not qualify as full-on websites, but for those who are hip, Amplifeeder creates sites that are the living end in terms of social media aggregation. Really, we all create so much content across our various networks that a personal site can be static and even redundant. Amplifeeder uses great design templates to bring together blog posts, Twitter and Facebook updates, Flickr pics, YouTube videos, and any number of other social media happenings. The page we created is beyond cool and serves as a gorgeous, clean portal to all the places we really live online. Plus, the data you put here is all portable, backup-able, and restorable.

YourOwn.com: Hosting options are coming soon, according to site creator Jon Davies.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Customize your heart out with a blank CSS slate.

SEO-riffic: This part's all up to you. Your SEO will be the moment of truth: What DO you really talk about and share most? Transparency meets SEO when Amplifeeder serves an aggregation of your social streams.

So there you have four great resources for website creation, from super simple to creatively complex. Now get out there and start souping up your web presence. We just made keeping up with the Joneses that much more competitive.

One denomination, the United Methodist Church, has opted for a boldly redesigned web presence to ask users, "What if church wasn't just a building, but thousands of doors? Each of them opening up to a different concept or experience of church - and a journey that could change our world. Would you come?"

Apart from being remarkably aesthetically pleasing and entirely modern, the site also blows the lid off of traditional expectations of static church websites. Even non-Methodists or non-Christians would get a kick out of the rich interactivity: The TALK page that allows users to respond to simple questions, the FIND page that directs users to the closest churches with programs most relevant to users' interests, the LISTEN page with audio news features and an iLike music player.

We caught up with one of the minds behind the site, Miiacom's Bayard Saunders, in Nashville, Tennessee. "The big idea," he said, "was to serve the content of the home page like a giant tag cloud based on feeds from news sources, blogs (including Twitter), keyword searches, site paths and referring pages. So by design, the site is constantly refreshed and always highlighting the most relevant content based on the most current topics relevant to seekers."

Saunders also revealed that an ad buy-fueled partnership with Google has allowed for additional relevant innovations, including a Methodist layer on Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Friend Connect, and content fed by individual UMC churches from Google Apps.

"It is ground-breaking, certainly for an official religious denomination's website," he said. "And it's been quite an interesting experience, designing a web presence for 'the God account.'"

As a resident of Wellington, I don't have far to go to attend Webstock. Some of the sessions I'm looking forward to checking out include David Recordon on the 'Open Social Web', Fiona Romeo on 'Astrotagging bots and citizen scientists' (got to attend that for the title alone!), Heather Champ on 'Shepherding Passionate Communities', and Google Chrome impresario Ben Goodger on 'A retrospective of ballet classics' (witty titles galore in Webstock this year).

Also who can resist Bruce Sterling's talk entitled 'The Short but Glorious Life of Web 2.0, And What Comes Afterward' (!)

If you're local and want to attend, you can still pick up a ticket. It runs from 19-20 February, with workshops happening earlier in the week. If you can't attend, stay tuned for coverage on ReadWriteWeb later this week.

Originally designed as a solution for e-commerce sites, the service strangely called Adam is not complicated to use. However, the company does estimate that the time it takes from mashup creation to having it live on your web site could be approximately 20 minutes. That's a little bit longer than just linking to a PDF or even uploading it to a document-hosting service like Scridb or Issuu. Still, the extra time may be worth it because Adam lets you create a truly interactive document by allowing you to add videos, HTML, stylized text, and more to what were previously just plain files.

For those familiar with designing web pages, the process may seem familiar. To add content to a document on Adam, you select various "hotspots" in the document and then add the content you want to mashup. This is where you would paste in any text, images, music, or videos you want to appear when the user mouses over that part of the document. The service currently integrates with other content providers including YouTube, flickr, metacafe, Veoh, vimeo, and imeem.

The best way to understand what Adam can do, though, is to view some sample of it in action. You can check out a mashed up floor plan or you can see all the content providers in use on one document.

Adam doesn't provide anything that a talented web designer can't already do on their own, but like every service that comes out of the Web 2.0 movement, it's about letting everyone have access to the tools that previously only skilled professionals knew how to use. If you want to try Adam for yourself, you can sign up here.