Does your school's web site look appeal to women?

Women and men are completely different when it comes to choosing the web sites they visit, and it has nothing to do with the site's subject matter or function, according to a new, first-of-its-kind study conducted by researchers at Glamorgan University Business School in Wales.

Appeal is gendered

Aesthetics and usability determine whether a site attracts more women or men, reported the study, and what appeals greatly to one sex was found to be completely unattractive to the other. The study also found, almost unilaterally, that women preferred web sites designed by women, and men preferred those designed by men.

Using test subjects who rated personal web pages created by 30 female and 30 male university students for ease of navigation and aesthetics, researchers found that women preferred colorful sites and pages, with color in both background and typeface. They also liked sites with informal rather than posed pictures.

In contrast, men preferred dark colors, fewer colors in the background and typeface, and more formal typography. They also liked sites with straight, horizontal lines and a three-dimensional look with "self-propelling" images instead of stationary objects.

Nothing these preferences, the researchers checked the web sites of 32 British schools. "We were particularly interested in the education sector because its target audience is almost equally balanced between the sexes. In fact the proportion of females in the student body has settled at slightly more than half in recent years," said Gloria Moss, a research fellow at Glamorgan.

Guess how many sites they found with a masculine orientation? A whopping 94%. Only 2% featured a female-favored design. Not surprisingly, 74% were designed by a male or mostly male team, while only 7% were produced by a female or a female team.