Optimising web design across europe : gender implications

The World Wide Web grows currently at a rate of 20% per year and dramatic claims are made about the effectiveness of web-based commercial efforts. The centrality of non price mechanisms of differentiation to the perception, enjoyment and ease of use felt using websites is acknowledged but the only statistically rigorous studies of language, form and content have been conducted within a universalist paradigm. This paper reports on an integrationist approach to web aesthetics involving an analysis and comparison of the features contained in a websites created by male and female students across three European countries, the UK, France an Poland, countries at different stages of internet development, to measure the strength of difference between male and female website aesthetics.