IPC Gives Women’s Site An ABC1 Makeover
IPC Media has relaunched its women’s website BeMe.com. On its first appearance a year ago (see Web Review: BeMe.com), when dotcom fever ruled and women were the target of choice, the site originally borrowed editorial from the full range of IPC women’s titles, making it content rich but somewhat blurred in its audience target. The new approach aims to focus on a 20-35 ABC1 audience, building the online presence of the Marie Claire brand and later the celebrity title Now.
In order to implement the new approach, the editorial team has been restructured. The site has retained its system of channels covering entertainment, fashion and beauty, travel and shopping and so on, and these channels now each have a dedicated team. Eleni Kyriacou has been promoted from her position as head of content to executive editor of the site, reporting to commercial director Sarah Fitzgerald.
In terms of appearance, the revamp has brightened up the trademark colours a shade and modernised the fonts. However, although it is light years away from CharlotteStreet.com’s dreadful navy blue, BeMe has not quite achieved the freshness of recent US import iVillage, which achieved double its original target for visitors in the first three months of this year (see Internet Round-Up).
Content rich, with its combination of original material and lifts from IPC print titles, the pages load quickly and look pretty, with plenty of glossy images. However, navigation is still clunky, with too many dead ends, interactivity in all but the most basic chat room format is almost non-existent and the advertisers that lie cluttered around the periphery of each page seem to have got the hang of slinky graphics better than the site itself.
The addition of well-selected online shopping links, along with more obvious pushing of IPC magazines shows that the site is now having to earn its makeover. But with many media outfits making a conscious effort to size down their online operations, IPC’s continued confidence in BeMe is notable. Today also saw the announcement of a deal with Capital Radio to carry a specially designed narrowband radio station on the site (see Capital Signs Syndication Deals For New Online Radio Stations), indicating that this confidence extends beyond the limits of King’s Reach Tower.
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