ReadWriteWeb

Three years ago we reviewed Martha Stewart's women's lifestyle website, marthastewart.com. At that time, April 2007, the site had just undergone a web 2.0 facelift. Martha Stewart 2.0 included more videos, blogging and general community features such as recipe swap functionality and message boards. It planned to add further personalization and community features over 2007.

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.

Recently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The format would allow more typefaces to appear across the web and to be readable by both humans and search engines.

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.

Sometimes, even HTML is just too hard.

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.

Today, Salesforce.com has taken their enterprise cloud computing to the next level with Force.com Sites.

The new offering from this "platform as a service" allows anyone to easily build a fully-featured website using the very same cloud infrastructure it has provided for applications. In other words, a comprehensive website can now be created through Force.com, and literally all you need do is design your UI with web standards such as HTML, JavaScript, Flex and CSS.

Churches aren't the first organizations that come to mind when you think about intelligent adoption and incorporation of social media. Nevertheless, many feel that if there was ever an organization in need of modern relevance, the Christian church in America is it.

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?"

Webstock, a conference for Web professionals, is happening in Wellington New Zealand this week. As usual it's a classy lineup of speakers and a number of international webheads will be jetting in for the event. They include science fiction author Bruce Sterling, Flickr's Heather Champ, Social Web designer Joshua Porter, Dopplr's Matt Biddulph, Institute for the Future's Jane McGonigal, Six Apart's David Recordon, The Guardian's Meg Pickard, NZ Foo Camp's Nat Torkington, Yahoo's Tom Coates, online performance artist Ze Frank, and many more.

The current crop of online office suites from Google, Zoho, or ThinkFree is quite usable, but most of these products still feel very limited compared to the power of Microsoft's Office products. The newest entrant in this market, Live Documents, however, is trying to change this by developing a fully featured online/offline office suite. Yesterday, Live Documents, which was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia, who famously sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1998, released its first product: Live Presentations.

Don't you hate it when you click a link only to discover it wasn't a web page, but a slow-loading PDF instead? Maybe it's time for publishers to find something to do with those PDFs that makes them a lot more interesting and engaging for their site's users. A new mashup tool called Adam (Beta) can help. It lets you take static files like PDFs and images and mash them up with web content like HTML and multimedia. Adam then provides you with an embed code so you can display these new remixed files on your web site.