The reason I wanted to redesign it was because, as you pointed out when yours? was nominated for the design award, most of the work was done by the default Drupal themes so I wanted something I'd done myself. And I've got a few other projects for which I see this as a bit of a sandbox.

I've certainly learned a lot about all sorts of bits of Drupal while doing it - views and theming them, blocks and positioning them and so on. The aim was to break up the content a bit so instead of presenting one long list of content and links there would be one main post followed by blocks with links and listings and that they'd appear in different parts of the page.

I've gone back to the drawing board armed with this new knowledge and am learning a little bit more about theming different blocks based on the region they are in and so on and will be able to put some of the links I think are keeping people on the site reading "related" stories into the nodes themselves which will achieve a similar result.

Though having said all that I've also just discovered how to make expandable "blingy" buttons so that might also slow it down a bit, but I'm going to be a bit more ruthless about external embedded links that call images or scripts from elsewhere as I notice those slow things down. But if everything of that sort is in the right place on the page it should nott disturb loading my content (ie always loading after my important content is already rendered).

I tried turning on CSS caching but it didn't seem to take - and I know my files are being handled the right way to allow it so I'll need to investigate. I can also probably cache some individual blocks and maybe even throttle some if it looks really slow. But I'm having fun! Got a busy week ahead though so not much more might happen till I get another chance next weekend.

It's the best CMS I've used so far IMO - far easier to get under the hood with than Plone/Zope, say, and better built than most of the PHP ones I tried a few years before that.