News 

According to the researchers at the Glamorgan University Business School, both the content, as you might expect, and the design of a site will determine whether it is chiefly visited by men or women. It seems that men prefer sites designed by men, while women prefer a woman's hand.

Sixty people were asked to consider the usability of 60 personal Web pages and it seems that women like pages with more colour and informal rather than posed pictures while men are keener on dark tones, straight lines. Overall men preferred a more 'formal' look.

Gloria Moss, research fellow at the University of Glamorgan Business School, said that with the size of the Web doubling every two to three months it is more important than ever to catch the eye of the passing surfer.

'We

ADVERTISEMENT

started off by looking at the personal websites created by 60 university students, 30 male and 30 female, to discover whether there were any major design differences. We looked at factors such as language, visuals, and navigation - the differences were immediately apparent,' she explained. 'We compared the sites on 23 factors and differences emerged on just over half of these. This is a massive number'.

Taking these results, the researchers then looked at the websites for 32 British universities and decided that 94 were male-oriented with just two per cent leaning towards women. Unsurprisingly, the majority were produced by a man or predominantly male team.

Looking further afield, Moss's team found similar results among universities in France and Finland.

Moss also studied beauty and angling websites and found that although the audiences were highly polarised, men dominated design in both areas.

'The absence of a female Web aesthetic in the beauty websites would make these sites less optimally effective than they could be,' Moss concluded. 'This is the first study to really tackle this issue in any depth and its findings could have a big influence on how businesses and organisations utilise their Web space. It is no longer satisfactory to assume that an 'effective website' is perceived in the same way by all visitors.'