There's more to the net than porn but are girls' sites worth a visit? Alice Hart-Davis investigates Listen up, girlies - and all those chaps who read their partners' glossies! Time to put down the cappuccino, cosy up into your best swivel chair and overcome your fear of the mouse.
In the wake of websites such as handbag.com (the Boots/Telegraph joint venture), CharlotteStreet.com (run by Associated New Media) and Icircle (Freeserve's offering) comes beme.com (that's Be Me, in case you're reading too fast) from magazine giant IPC.
Cheap christian audigierIt should by now have filtered into your general consciousness that women's portal sites - which is what such gateways to the internet are called - are big news and big business. IPC and co have no time for the popular theory that women aren't actually interested in the web. They are sure they are - or will be, given sufficient reason.
But have they got the formula right? On the one hand, the webmasters and webmistresses know that today's woman is a lady in a rush; a time-pressured career gal. Or maybe she's a single mum or a high-flyer (or perhaps all three, in which case she won't have time to bookmark the sites, let alone explore them) who needs information and needs it fast.
On the other hand, they reckon most women love to sift, so sites are made eminently browsable. Put the two together and you get a site like CharlotteStreet, with a heap of information, contents, ads, horoscopes and news stories flung in your face at once. The list of contents - family, work, money, home - is reassuringly familiar to any reader of women's magazines. When three out of seven of the home channel stories are about babies, you get a feel for their target audience.
Replica Epi leatherHandbag is all neat and tidy and stuffed with information. Even its contents are listed in alphabetical order. Its stated aim is to be useful: news you can use. It can provide you with an online address book, guide you into its property pages and even offer you the latest lipstick colours. If you're the sort of person who enjoys articles entitled "Going metric: how to cope with the changeover in the kitchen" well, it's your bag.
Just as flat is Icircle, which somehow seems rather American probably because of the juxtaposition of a piece on ranch holidays with exhortations to "Join our community". Register? Honey, I'm busy.
BeMe, by contrast, has leaped so far beyond the magazine-but-not- quite-as-you-know-it concept that you wonder if you've landed in the wrong place. In this case it's a cool, mauve, empty space through which you can catch a glimpse of some funky diva's face winking and blowing kisses. There appears to be nothing on it until your cursor hovers over the numbered colours at the side of the page and they spring to life. News, culture, consumer stuff; clearly this is presentation for the new millennial Miss and Mrs.
"We wanted the site to have personality," says Hilary Burden, IPC's women's media director. "Magazines can try to appeal to women at every stage of life, but ultimately they are limited by one brand title. The web
embroidered patches is so much wider. We want to make BeMe the first place women go to. It's got to be easy, it's got to be female-friendly and it has to be jargon-free."
The site is quick to tell you that it won't make assumptions about who you are or what you want, and the less-is-more presentation is soothing to the frazzled surfer. Like layers being peeled off an onion, more menus emerge, one beneath another
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