Want to make your new Web based business really fly? Consider staffing your content and design division with a partnership team made up equally of men and women. Here are some reasons.

MEN & WOMEN ACTUALL DO THINK DIFFERENTLY
Box it up, tape it shut, stick it in a closet, close the door, and look around for the next opportunity. This is a shorthand version of how many men handle broken relationships, disappointing jobs, and many of the things life throws as them. In the same situation, a woman works at fitting the new relationship, idea, or job into the existing scene, rearranges the material, adds a bit new here and there, fixes the broken items, and does her best to make things work. Men, if given a choice between three business ideas will chose either A, B, or C. Women will often say, “Use A here, B in this situation, and save C for the occasion when A or B won’t work.” Men tend to fixate on one thing at a time while women look at the overall picture.

An example of this behavior is television watching. When watching a football game, most men are totally and completely focused on the game. Men don’t hear or see anything else. An oft-told ‘joke’ is that the house could fall down around a man watching a good game; but as long as no debris blocked the screen, cut the cable, or interrupted the power, it would be okay. The opposite is true of most women. Many women are able to fix dinner for the family, listen for the baby’s cry, talk business on the phone, carry on a conversation with the kids, and still watch and understand a television program.

PARALLEL VS. LINEAR THINKING
Another difference is the type of thinking. Men tend to be linear. Men often cannot even consider problems B, C, and D until they have solved problem A. Women tend to be parallel, that is they look at A, B, C, and D as parts of the whole, and as such try to solve A such that B, C, and D will naturally occur as a result of the decisions made in A. In a nutshell (see how we men categorize, classify, and compartmentalize?), men are serial and women are parallel.

Now let’s apply this man-woman distinction to your Website. Your business goal is to make money from your Website, to have it become a successful venture. Often, the first development task is to concentrate on the home page design that attracts as many people as possible. After the viewers find your site, your next goal is to have the viewer buy something, and then you want them to return again and again to buy more. It would also be wonderful if the viewer found your site so exciting that they would tell a friend. Right? Right!

SINGLE TASKING VS. MULTI-TASKING
In designing a modern Website, men typically tend to fixate on one goal at a time, and when that goal has been accomplished, turn their attention to the next. Most men will concentrate on the home page first, and save design considerations of the remainder of the site for later consideration. Although the overall goal of the Website is there, it is not as important as the present task.

Typically, a woman would not tend to fixate on any one item to the exclusion of others, but would keep the desired overall results in the foreground while working on the individual elements. What would seem logical to a man might be viewed by a woman as a potential narrowing of the results. Since women often operate in a relationship mode, they would tend to look at how the Website would enable people to ‘tell-a-friend, as opposed to just presenting the facts about a product or service.

IT'S THE FACTS - JUST THE FACTS
Whether you agree or disagree with the above, the analysis is based on facts. If you are concerned as to the validity of these facts, read some of the recent books on men/women relationships. Not all women think in parallel terms, and not all men think serially; but enough do exhibit these behaviors to indicate you should seriously consider the consequences of not incorporating men/women teams in your business.