Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Google actually crawls 150kb, excluding css files, images, etc. 150kb is much more than 200 words, and the experiment suggested by Mr Bennett proves it.

Matt, The duplication of template won't hurt you at all. It would be worthwhile to vary the images, though. As for the linking between subdomains , If the content is good and unique on both sites, link between them in a manner  that is appropriate for the user and the subject matter. I wouldn't link between directories from the footer if you already have navigation that has links to those directories.