By Margaret Wong
The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs is a seven year-old organization
created to promote "women's opportunities to start, build, manage
and invest in market-leading companies. FWE offers innovative programs,
access to top-tier funding sources and a collaborative online community
that accelerates women entrepreneurs' ability to launch and build
world-class companies". The first of its kind, FWE is bridging
the gap between male and female entrepreneurs.
Their site, www.fwe.org, looks clean
and slick. The homepage presents itself like that of the cover of
a magazine. Its dim colors present a feeling of sophistication, a
formal location of business and higher class associates, in contrast
to other commercial sites where loud colors are used to attract the
viewers' attention.
As far as the technical design of the site goes, it is created with
various javascripts, layers, and image rollovers. These techniques
allow a sophisticated creation without time consumption similar to
that of Flash enabled sites. However, to low-end users the graphic
load might still create some problems. Fortunately the target audience,
potential female entrepreneurs, are probably all capable of accessing
high speed connections. In that sense the gap of the digital divide
is not as apparent.
Its effectiveness in bridging the gap between male and female entrepreneurs
should be of no question. The air of its presentation, throughout
the site's organization and consistency, shows a strong support structure
for its proclaimed purpose. www.fwe.org does not fall into stereotypical
female designs, therefore appearing no different than counterparts
targeted at the male population. The message it is sending is simply
that women can succeed as entrepreneurs just as well. The FWE is even
offering classes and other supports for potential women entrepreneurs
to bridge this gap.
Once again an emphasis on equality on the web, www.fwe.org
succeeds in having an equal presence on the web as other sites
of similar nature. But its major downfall is the slow server retrieval
of database backed pages. The slow connection simply cannot be overlooked.
Especially when the events listings are heavily referenced upon, and
it literally takes ten seconds for the page to load. An overall well
thought out site, it still showed some weakness against high powered
sites. But its advancements already show promise in bridging the gap
that exist now.