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!