Work samples
Four sites you can open right now.
These are not client logos. They are sites we built and still run, every day, with our own name on them. Open one, view the source, run it through any speed test you like. That is the point of showing them.
Plainly stated
Whose sites these are.
Michael Christensen owns and operates all four. The Monument Independent is his local newsroom, and Tri-Lakes Colorado is published by it. Being a Beacon Lite Digital client buys no coverage and no editorial influence there; the newsroom and this practice are separate concerns that happen to share a person.
We would rather say that here than let you work it out from a WHOIS record later. When there is client work worth showing, and the client agrees to be named, it will go on this page and it will be labeled as client work.
01
The Monument Independent
A local newsroom covering Monument, Palmer Lake and the Tri-Lakes area, with daily reporting, a weekly newsletter and paying members.
Role: Publisher, and the person who builds and maintains it
Built with: WordPress and Newspack, chosen deliberately
- WordPress on purpose, not by inheritance — Newspack exists for exactly this job and nothing static replaces it
- Memberships, donations, newsletter signup and comment moderation, none of which a static file can do alone
- Structured data for every article, so reporting here is quotable by search engines and assistants
- Analytics and conversion tracking wired end to end and verified in the data, not assumed
- So yes, we build and run WordPress. We just do not reach for it when a business does not need it
02
Tri-Lakes Colorado
A free directory and guide to businesses, events and history across Monument, Palmer Lake and Woodmoor.
Role: Designed, built and maintained
Built with: Eleventy, deployed from GitHub to Cloudflare Pages
- Every listing is a plain data file, so the directory is readable by machines as data rather than scraped from a layout
- Event listings aggregated automatically from town and community calendars
- Local business schema on every listing page
- Costs nothing per month to run at this size
03
Yes for D38
A community information site on how Lewis-Palmer schools are funded, and why an override that has raised the same amount since 1999 no longer stretches as far.
Role: Designed and built
Built with: Astro, static output
- Built to explain a genuinely complicated funding formula to people who are not accountants
- Loads fast enough to survive being opened on a phone in a school parking lot
- Written so the arguments are quotable in full rather than trapped in an image
04
CivicPrinciples
Scores city councils and county commissions against fifteen nonpartisan governing principles, meeting by meeting, on the record.
Role: Designed and built
Built with: Astro, static output
- Zero JavaScript on the homepage — the page you receive is the finished page
- Which is the point: an AI crawler that runs no JavaScript still reads every word
- Scores and reasoning published as structured data, not just as visible text
- The lightest site on this list, and the one that does the most explaining
What the numbers mean
255 KB against 18 KB, and both are right.
The Monument Independent carries 38 script files because it sells memberships, takes donations, runs a newsletter and moderates comments. Strip that out and it stops being a newspaper. CivicPrinciples carries none at all because nothing it does requires any, and every kilobyte it does not send is a kilobyte that cannot fail to load.
Most small-business sites weigh what the newsroom weighs while doing what the light ones do. They are paying the cost of an application to publish a brochure — and paying it twice, because the crawlers that decide whether an AI assistant can recommend you mostly do not run JavaScript at all. A page that needs a script to become readable is, to them, blank.
The useful question is never "is JavaScript bad," and it is not "is WordPress bad" either. It is whether yours is buying anything. The newsroom runs WordPress because Newspack does things — paid memberships, donations, a comment queue — that no static file can do, and we build and maintain WordPress sites happily when that is the honest answer.
For most businesses around Monument it is not. A five-page site describing what you do, where you do it and how to reach you does not need a database, a login screen, a plugin update every other week or a monthly hosting bill. If your project genuinely needs WordPress we will tell you so and build it. We simply will not sell it to you by default.
Script counts and page weights measured on the live homepages in August 2026. They describe the HTML document only, not images or fonts. Go and check them — that is rather the point.
Want yours in the light column?
A five-page site built this way is $500, published on the pricing page like everything else. Or start with the free Visibility Snapshot and find out where you actually stand.