Chics Who Click: Which new women's site wins?

When a couple of media powerhouses launch competitive sites in the same month, it tends to make a little noise. Especially when they're both going after 40+ women. A demo they'd like us to believe is veiled in mystery, heretofore only defrocked by Lifetime and iVillage. A demo largely ignored by online marketers and jonesing for some real content.

Back to the powerhouses. We're talking about one of the founders of the Internet vs. the real-world lipstick mafia:

• Shine: Yahoo's latest attempt to win over the world with content comes to life in this editorial-style portal.


• WowOwow: By chics, for chics, this portal is the self-funded creation of Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, Mary Wells and Joni Evans.

Well, a month has gone by since the shiny new sites were unveiled. Plenty of time for a little investigation and trial and error.

What's working:

• Shine is smart to lead with thoughtful editorial. A big smart topic that is at once personal, female and thought provoking. Even women who love Oprah and Sex and the City have a conflicted relationship with their girly side. Leading with content and following with dish lets people get comfortable.


• WowOwow is making great use of its own real network. Offline heros - like Candice Bergen, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg - are creating fresh content for the site.


• I've come to really dig the Hair Day forecast on WowOwow. At first I thought it was vaguely insulting, but, really, it's chat-able and iconic and works for me.


• Shine feels like a magazine. The buckets of content. The reader feedback. It has excelled at taking an offline guilty pleasure and delivering it online completely intact.

What's not:

• WowOwow, meet Ajax. Ajax, Wowowow. It's easy to see the difference between savvy Yahoo and this group of newbies. The usability of the site is aggravating. Always more clicks. Even for easy little widgets and polls that should be included inline with the content.


• Shine's top nav is a little reductive considering the pop of everything else. They've designed it to encourage a full scroll. Which is interesting and oh-so-tabloid, but I think users are used to being able to increasingly limit their content to what's most relevant to them. That feels underplayed here.


• WowOwow strikes me as a little too reliant on community content. Everything is an open-ended question with a click to see what other people said. Couldn't we take some learnings from Twitter on this interaction?


• WowOwow gave up their above-masthead real estate to advertising. Ouch. Unless done incredibly well, that's a killer in editorial. And this snowy site is not done well enough to pull it off

Final word:
WowOwow walks away from some of the proven-for-a-reason principles of user experience. And community. And, for what? A 40+ Facebook group? Uh uh. 40 is the new 25. Your audience doesn't need Internet for Dummies.

Meanwhile Yahoo steps up the plate with one of the best sites I've seen from them. It's clever. Approachable. Content rich. Comfortable.

I hate to say it, but: I'm going with Goliath on this one. Go Shine!