I came across a couple of university web sites and was interested how they were programmed.
The first is Bucknell’s Virtual Tour site: http://community.bucknell.edu/. It is made up of a lot of full screen photos but seems to load extremely fast. Browse around and you can see what I am talking about. Probably AJAX pulling in photos after load?
Another is the Puget Sound site: http://www.pugetsound.edu/. Lots of content but due to the elegant design, not crowded. It seems they thought very thoroughly about all the elements. Check out the search field at the top right of the content pane.
By the way, these are two of the five Webby nominees – of which Elisa’s project for Wheaton is one: http://150.wheaton.edu/. Warning – this one takes a while to load, but it looks and works great!
The Bucknell site is 100% Flash. It’s cool and flashy, but won’t work on your iPad. Right-click anywhere on the page and you’ll get the Flash context-menu.
There’s nothing in the Puget Sound site that screams WordPress (or Drupal). They’ve either done a really good job of concealing it, or it isn’t WordPress.
On the Bucknell site, I do believe the Flash is loading the images on-demand, no? It looks like it, the way they come in a little choppily. So that’s basically AJAX. My only point is that I think YKK is right, it runs too fast to load all of those images on page load.