After some initial hesitation in taking up the technology, women are now logging on to the Internet in record numbers. According to a study cited in the New York Times, websites for women grew by 35 per cent in the last year – a statistic that should have every website owner and major brand for women dancing with glee. So why aren’t they?

Gillian Reagan from The New York Observer was one reporter who went in search of an answer last month at a New York Television Festival panel discussion titled “Reaching Women on the Web”. Despite record growth in the number of women logging on to the Internet, when it comes to meeting the needs of women on the web, some of the world’s largest websites for women are at a loss to answer the question of what women really want from the web.

But it’s not just the sites owned by the large corporations that are struggling to understand what women want on the Internet.  With no advertising or promotion, Australian Women Online currently receives more than 600,000 hits a month – not a bad effort when you consider we don’t have the resources of the most popular websites for women.  But when it comes to predicting what women want from the website, I will admit that we are just as clueless as those sites owned by the big corporations in the United States.

Some of the most popular articles on the website this year have come as a total surprise to us.  It gets pretty frustrating when an article like Women Pee Standing Up? which took only twenty minutes to write, consistently appears in the top ten.  Whereas a feature article such as Natural Products and Real Women: creating positive change within the beauty industry which took many hours of blood, sweat and tears to complete, barely registers on the radar.

I use to think websites that focus on beauty, fashion and celebrities were the problem.  But I think most of the websites targeted to women would like to publish more articles on the really important issues, but the public just doesn’t respond to them.  Most women log on to the Internet to relax and be entertained.  They don’t want to think about the big issues and when they do, a website targeted to women would not be their first choice.

So in an attempt to create the quintessential website for women, Australian Women Online is currently conducting a web survey.  The survey “What Do Women Want on the Internet?” will only take you a few minutes to complete and no personal information or contact details will be collected.  We would like to hear from women in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.  If we receive a sufficient number of responses we will share the results with the media:  CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY