Design

By me, JM Addington. I guess I like grey and sans serif fonts. (I usually outsource design to artists who like color, however.)

Content Management

I use Modx to power the backend of this site, on a Linux server hosted by LiquidWeb (the best hosts out there!) When I read that Modx doesn't generate any HTML on its own I knew I had to try it.

Modx isn't for the beginner, nor the faint of heart, but if you are willingly to put some time into it is fantastic. I have found it more flexible and friendly and less bloated that most of the other CMS' I've used in the past

Fonts

All the fonts you see on this site are loaded from Google's Web Fonts. Two lines of CSS, one @import or link to a style-sheet and one font-family: [font] is all it takes to get rolling.

This is News Cycle, used on the menu.

This is Cuprum, used on page titles.

This is Terminal Dosis Light, used for the main body text.

Sliders

The home page pictorial slideshow is powered by Nivo Slider and the news slider powered by Anything Slider; both use Jquery.

Load Times

Despite extensive Javascript and CSS, the load times for this site should be less than 2.2 seconds on a DSL connection (1.5mbps). The total (home page) payload is under 300kb including pictures, about 100kb without pictures.

Because loads are spread out across three domains (hopefully this will go up to four soon, to reduce JS blocking) most everything is loaded concurrently. Indeed, before any CSS/JS optimization a page load only requires 16 requests. For comparison, as of July 9th, Google requires 12 requests and loads in just under 1.5s. CNN requires 158 requests and loads in about 6.3s.

Finally, in addition to preferring minimized JS/CSS, content is compressed by the server further reducing load time.