Web Review: BeMe.com
Launching into an already crowded market, IPC’s web portal for women, beme.com, needed to be different. By the time it finally emerged earlier this month, rival offerings from the Telegraph, Associated New Media and Freeserve had already staked their claim as publishers realised the e-commerce potential of womens’ sites.
Where its rivals fall down, however, BeMe.com succeeds; its long incubation period has produced a site which instantly stands out above the others. Its homepage sets the scene: it is immediately compelling in its simplicity while those of its rivals are crowded and mundane. Organised into colour-coded mood-related sections, it covers the main content areas of other offerings but in a more elegant fashion.
The mood-related sections don’t always make sense but look nice: blue is for news and has its own newspaper called The Broad; yellow is for careers and consumer choice; pink (the “safety zone”) is based around the home with emotional and practical guidance on subjects ranging from tool kits to pregnancy; brown guides you through the latest culture and trends with lunchtime reviews, entertainment news, travel and restaurants and the orange playroom of channel 5 has jokes, rants and gossip. Finally the “my BeMe” channel lets you personalise all of the above.
The attractive layout is not let down by the content which covers many typical women’s issues but manages to avoid being patronising. An open letter to Tony Blair asks him to become a new man and take paternity leave on the birth of his baby; a campaign called Women at Work responds to injustice in the workplace; and interviewees include a Cherokee poet and an international humanitarian.
The site has some navigational problems but on the whole is attractive, accessible and engaging.