This is, without question, the biggest project I've ever done. VeloNews.com is a cycling news website that I built on top of a highly customized version of the Drupal CMS. Painstaking work has gone into the usability and overall performance of the website. There are multiple templates for different events, such as the Tour de France and a special version for mobile browsers. The site employs several major work-arounds to cache data and improve performance. According to gomez.com, the homepage loads in around 2 seconds in both NYC and San Fran, which is really good, relatively speaking.

During heavy Tour de France traffic, the VeloNews site will get over 1 million pageviews a day with as many as 180,000 unique visitors, and over 40,000 people watching our live updates. The site has handled over 50,000 requests per minute at about 30% server capacity, and thanks to heavy optimization, the database server rarely spikes over 3% capacity.

The homepage and index pages use easy to click block links, and the article pages use a larger than normal font size for legibility. This in combination with the all-CSS layout and standards compliance, makes the site very accessible to a wide range of readers.

The search engine is a modified version of the stock Drupal engine. This version also allows image searching by keyword, which has been a nice treat for cycling fans.

All told, it has been a huge project and has been a great success in the marketplace, positioning VeloNews as the benchmark for cycling news on the Web.

VeloNews.com