#1 Colors

When you are designing or planning how your website looks like, keep in mind the colors you use because they will affect the target audience of your site!

According to research studies, men tend to like linearity, formality and color schemes that do not contain too many variations in colors. Basically, a website with few colors will appeal to guys.

Women, on the other hand, go for more colors, more formality and less linearity. Websites that have plentiful variations in colors will appeal to females rather than to males. Also, it has been found that men tend have lower tolerance of formality than women (surprised?).

Most of us have been brought up to associate pink with girls and blue with boys - we see that in the clothing color of new born babies where baby girls are dressed in pretty pink and baby boys, in blue. Although this seems to be no more than a conventional way of thinking, there is truth in this. Research shows that indeed, women tend to have greater affinity for pink to liliac shades; men tend to prefer shades of pale blue. Linking this back to our topic on webpage colors, the color tone and scheme of your site does affect (subconsciously, perhaps) the gender of your visitors. So if your site is quite obviously targeting a particular gender, take the colors of your site seriously - you wouldn't want to be getting attention from the wrong target audience!

Here's a site which you can visit if you're interested to know more about gender and websites » more?