Remarkablogger

Web Sites Have Sex Appeal is a brief report on a study conducted by the University of Glamorgan in the United Kingdom. What it concludes may not appear at first to have a profound effect on how you choose to design your blog, but I’ll share some other information with you later that will put the study results into profound perspective.

The study concludes that men and women “reacted very differently to sites when surfing the web.” And:

Males, for example, favored the use of straight lines, as opposed to rounded forms, few colors in the typeface and background, and formal typography. As for language, they favored the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations. Women were nearly the opposite.

What surprised me about this was that in their study, men disliked abbreviations and women preferred them. My guess is that if they had looked at acronyms, they would’ve found women disliking them and men preferring them. But there’s more:

The study also found that men and women preferred web sites designed by their own sex.

“The statistics are complicated, but there is no doubt about the strength of men and women’s preference for sites produced by people of their own sex,” statistician and co-researcher Rod Gunn said in a statement released Monday.

That is very interesting when you consider the fact that websites are overwhelmingly designed by men with no input from women, no user-testing by women (or anyone, for that matter), nor is there any attempt made at all to specifically appeal to women. The exceptions would be obviously products and services which focus exclusively on women. A quick look at such sites for cosmetics, clothing, and even children’s goods is very revealing. All very linear, all probably designed by men. The Gap, along with nearly every other retailer out there, makes no distinctions between the men’s and women’s sections of their website, and even if they did, it probably wouldn’t be enough, because most of the men’s clothing purchases are going to made by women, anyway.

Consider:

• Women are the sole or primary decision makers for just about every kind of purchase, commercial stuff as wll as consumer stuff.
• All consumer purchases: 83%
• Vacations: 92%
• New homes: 91%
• Consumer electronics: 51%
• 6 out of every 10 new web users are women
• Over 90% of all websites are designed by… men?

(Data from Tom Peter’s Re-Imagine!)

Clearly, something is wrong with this. You need women to be in on the web design process. Period. If you can’t get women web designers, then do your user testing with women. Learn about this stuff as much as you can. In the next couple of years, I predict that blogs by men will be abandoned at ever higher rates, while those by women will thrive. The best thing you can do to change your thinking is to start seeing your customer as a woman. If you knew the majority of your site’s visitors spoke French, you wouldn’t say “to hell with that, I’m posting in German!” No, you’d everything you could to make sure the French loved your site and threw money at you to buy your stuff. It’s common sense. Imagine all that untapped business out there!

Let me end by offering some marketing & business resources:

• WonderBranding: Marketing to Women
• Lip-Sticking: Smart Marketing to Women Online
• Marketing to Women Online: How to Shatter Stereotypes and Discover What She Really Wants
• Tom Peters

Update: This post has been updated to correct some dead links and do some minor editing.