RCModelForum.com
 

Looking at the list of nominations for the site of the month I checked them all out and was really impressed by the RCModelForum.com web site. What a work of art it is.

It's obvious to me there was a lot of time and effort that went into their design. Man O man I wish I had the know how and talent to build such a site. It's easy on the eye, not cluttered with non-essential text or graphics. Just a real pleasure to look at and admire.

It goes without saying of course this is just my opinion, and you know what they say about opinions, or maybe it's better if you don't :)

That's my pickle for the morning'

It's a light loader too. Only a little over 200kb. It is proof you don't have to have a fat page to have a sharp page. You really don't need 2 megabytes on your page.

A fat page is a slow page, every time. This happens all too often, people sacrifice performance for essentially, their own ego. They want what they think looks good, (And usually, it doesn't. It's just garish and gaudy - it's LuLu Roman with too much makeup on and sweaty and out of breath just from walking across the room) for self gratification not thinking at all about the glut they're loading on people's browsers and the bandwidth they're just wasting with every pageload.

The RC site nicely balances form and function with style and aplomb. It's more like Daisy Duke to the garish LuLu Romans of the web - it's svelte, moves fact and is easy on the eyes too!

The site is largely using the Metro theme by PixelGoose if you're interested. Obviously they've made modifications but it's still really easy to tell.

The best style or theme is useless in and of itself. It can be a good start. It's the execution of that style or theme, that makes it pop. Or not.

Here's a hint for folks: If a style, right out of the box, loads 1mb or more on browsers the style is too fat. This isn't counting your own added images and Mods and stuff - this is just the style itself. You can pretty much tell this by the byte size of the files, for the style.

If our load time is large but everything on the website is nessisary, how do we get it ro run faster. do we need a bigger server or something?

Optimization workshop.

There you'll find actual case studies with real results, and can start a thread to get help with your own site(s).

What is pagespeed? It's heavily used in the first of the code then in various places on further down in the code.

Have you looked at the theme? It's basically 'out of the box', hence why I mentioned it for others who may like the look of it (I'm not trying to critique the forum at all, I think it is great, and love the fixed header idea).

No, I was making only a general rule of thumb comment, for folks who are looking at styles. If the style folder is fat, your site will be fat using that theme. Notice the operative word, IF.