Introduction

Digitally Driven is a website aimed at 16-30yr olds, who are interested in web design, more as a career than merely a hobby. It comprises mainly of articles and interviews about various webmaster issues, and also has a nice budding forum.

Does it Work?

It sure does, this is one of the things which impresses me most about this website; EVERYTHING seems to work and is complete. A very (very very very) common problem for websites is lack of regular updates, but in the short time this website has existed they have amassed a lot of unique content.

Design

The design of DD is pretty simple, but in a good way. It uses one central column to display all of the content, which works well. The navigation is by and large pretty intuitive, although I would prefer it if clicking on the logo took me back to the home page; a minor niggle.

One other issue, which is distracting me is the lack of padding on the left side of the articles, and also at the top of an article - I think it could do with a 10px padding maybe. Overall very good!

User Friendliness

This site is very user friendly and intuitive, the only possible complaint I could have is that there are quite a lot of links in the top navigation bar (although they are split up by differing sizes). Other than this minor niggle its great!

Speed

OK, as this is my first review I have a confession to make, I have very fast broadband access, so this might not help everyone, but this site loads pretty much instantly for me - 2 seconds tops.

Because I have a massive unfair advantage over dial-up, I ran the site through a speed tester - and it will take a decent amount of time to load if you have a weak 56k connection, this will be GREATLY reduced if you have caching enabled. Click to see the speed report for exact values.

Overall Impression

There are a few things which don’t fit into the previous sections which I feel deserve merit here. The content is very informative, but not technical - the writers have a very informal style which is greatly appreciated in the web design industry, where technobabble tends to rule!

Another thing worth a mention is that the forum is very friendly and a great place to go for some fun chatting. So final score? 4.5 stars, very almost a 5 star site but needs more content and to speed up the download speed if it is to improve!