A fully static group site for a 120M-reach youth media company

What the site is

RAD Media is the parent group of Culted and XO, the publications where I lead website development as part of a much bigger team, plus the Rad Studio creative agency and the Know Your Fashion podcast. The group site is where advertisers and partners land: brand profile pages with audience stats replacing the traditional PDF media kit, and a library of agency case studies for campaigns with Gucci, Prada, Nike, Mercedes-Benz, Bentley, OMEGA and Burberry.

The media kit is a page an advertiser can read in the tab they’re already in, not a PDF they have to be sent.

The brief

RAD Media is a premium media group, and the site had to carry that (full-screen video hero, logo morphs between pages, a filterable grid of campaign showreels) with nothing behind it to patch, back up or break. The client has always wanted a website that feels unique, and on WordPress, where I’d built for this brand before, templates and structural limits kept getting in the way of that. This was the first build where the platform set no design limits: anything they asked for, I could build. So WordPress was ruled out early and the site was built from scratch in Astro, which turned out to be faster than building it on WordPress would have been. Content changes are infrequent and deliberate; a CMS would be dead weight.

What I built

A fully static Astro site. Thirty-three prerendered pages served from Cloudflare’s edge. No CMS, no database, no API, no server-set cookies. What an attacker would normally target isn’t there.

Twenty-four case-study pages from structured content. Each campaign page (challenge, solution, results with stat counters, previous/next chaining, its own OG image and Article structured data) is generated at build time from one content entry. Adding a campaign is adding a file.

A video-heavy grid that stays light. The Rad Studio page carries 24 hover-play campaign showreels, lazy-loaded with preload="none" so nothing downloads until it’s needed, and all autoplay gated behind prefers-reduced-motion. Ten of the showreels arrived as portrait video; I edited each with a blurred background fill to sit properly in the 16:9 grid, then compressed them for the web. The media production is part of the job, not someone else’s problem.

The portrait clips carry a blurred fill either side, so a mixed set of formats still sits in one tidy grid.

Page morphs without a framework. Brand logos transition seamlessly between the group index and each brand page using view transitions, with a persistent custom cursor; the total hand-written JavaScript on the site is around 9KB.

Privacy-first by construction. Analytics loads only after explicit consent, with Reject given equal weight to Accept. The server sets no cookies at all.

Readable by machines as well as people. The site was designed with AI-readability in mind: AI assistants increasingly read websites on people’s behalf, and a clean, structured, fully prerendered site is exactly what they parse best.

The project that changed my workflow

This was my first production site on Astro + Cloudflare, and the one that moved my recommended workflow away from WordPress. The client is extremely iterative: they want to see a change live, sit with it, sometimes revert it or go a different way entirely. On WordPress that style of working was slow, frustrating and expensive. On this stack, design revisions turn around within a couple of hours and site-wide changes land fast, which saves me time and the client money.

It also settled the content-management question. Culted and XO publish articles daily, so in-house CMS editing is non-negotiable there. RAD is happy to email me for changes, which is usually faster than doing it themselves. In my experience, WordPress clients self-serve the small text edits but reach out for anything bigger anyway, so the CMS was mostly getting in the way. That’s why fully static fits here.

Why it matters

Culted and XO prove the stack at publisher scale; radmedia.com proves the other end of the same argument. When a site’s content changes a few times a year, the correct amount of backend is none, and the result is a site that loads instantly, can’t be hacked in any conventional sense, and will still work untouched in five years. This is the exact architecture behind my Static Site tier, running in production for a 120M-reach media group.