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.