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Wowowow designs it right
By susan | April 11, 2008
The new site for women over forty, of which I am one, is one of the first I’ve seen that is designed for eyes over forty. It seems to understand its target market and give visitors an appropriate customer experience. Offering a remarkably beautiful clean design with large headlines and lots of white space, it seems also designed for reading on screen, and not just clicking through or watching videos.
I don’t recommend this for all sites, certainly not those targeted at teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to prefer tiny fonts in many cases, so long as it looks cool. And perhaps because their parents can’t read it? But yes, absolutely, if you want people over the age of 40 (men and women) to stay at your site and read some content, please make it readable!
Now as for the name, I am withholding judgment because I’ve been wrong before. I can only speak for myself: I got a little dizzy typing in “wowowow” and making sure I had the correct number of w’s and o’s and not one too many. Typing words in English is very fast if they are words. Typing strings of letters can be more challenging. Wowowow seems, to me, to be a string of letters.
I can only assume that the site’s founders (who confessed to Charlie Rose that they had great difficulties coming up with a name) are using bookmarks or clickable icons on screen to reach their own site. And perhaps I’m unusual in more often typing a url to reach a site.
So I will have to come up with a better and faster trick for reaching wowowow.com, or practice a lot with both ring fingers. I only know that it could hamper the number of visits I make or how easily I get there. And clearly, as always, great content has to back up the design. So far it looks pretty good to me and I wish them well. I only wish they had asked me about the name first. I could have given them several alternatives that are still available, on the open market.
Topics: customer experience, marketing to women |