jt I like interesting interpretations certainly. My business community is pretty vanilla but my own personal community has given me long hours of custom fun.
www.housemorgain.co.uk/circle
It's still obviously a forum based community, but the navigation is strong and clear featuring What's On? outside the navbar as LATEST! on the side menu, as well as navbar. Also I brought the Quickmenu out and made it prominent on the sidebar.
Both the noticeboard area above the forums list and the sidebar offer you links to the main areas of the community.
The sidebar continues on almost all pages, looking just as it does on the front page.
The Library areas don't look like forums though they are built derivatively from forums; their threads/ Article pages feed into linked forum threads.
I use Nodes-As -Tabs quite extensively with LinkForums to make the navbar intuitively helpful (I hope).
My style is not at all a majority cup of tea and it's not meant to be. The site is not a business, and it's not about gaming, or any tightly focused niche. It's a broadminded little personal community of freedom lovers, mostly people I've collected over about 45 years.
If you don't like it you don't. We do.