The point behind the current design on Valid Webs is not the aesthetic aw that most WordPress designs focus on using large graphics or fancy images.
My key focus in this design is a common layout to work with for my future VW Pro Theme releases.
The key points of interest being
- Speed (Load Speed)
- SEO optimized
- Plenty of bells and whistles with caching
- Overall very heavily featured theme without side affects!
The list goes on, look around and you’ll see all of the extra features added and there is only one required plug-in.
The rest is built in and cached.
At the same time having graphic that are minimal and optimized and also places as sprites.
My biggest goal is to cram as much feature rich functionality in as I can without dragging the page or site down.
I see a lot of premium themes loaded up with great features, but then the page load speed drops out.
My goal is to avoid this by highly optimizing the theme as a frame to work from in the future of my designs.
Keep in mind that Google’s newest item added to their page ranking algorithm is page speed!