Bounce Rate Highly Dependent on Male / Female Audience

I've been checking my bounce rates, well actually not bounce rate but time on site and I saw that a large number of my sites had a poor time on site.

Here some reasons for that (I use Statcounter to track):

- External links on homepage, it's obvious Statcounter uses the exit links activity to measure time on site, I noticed this cause the links open in a new window so it's not really an exit from that point of view.

- Amount of content on homepage, I saw that shorter homepages performed way better than long homepages, perhaps cause my pages look a bit chaotic, a friend of mine also has lengthy homepages and he does a lot better, but the layout of his pages is much more pleasent on the eye,s and more informative like a huge overview page decently structured/setup.

- Introduction, the sites of mine that got straight to business answering the user query have a much higher "bounce" rate than the ones that start with a solid introduction like: "Hi, I am Dennis and like to welcome you to my site....."

Ok now let's stick to the thread topic:

Male vs Female

I chose all the themes for my sites but also asked my partner to chose a theme,which I personally considered the most ugly one but well, it was worth a try.

And guess what? The theme I didn't choose performed BEST of all!!!

What do my sites sell:

Site 1: Female hobby product

Site 2: Kitchen appliance (I suppose more females shop for that, sorry for being old fashioned)

Site 3: Juicers, once again I think more females buy this online

Site 4: Home & Living technical appliance, definitely male niche

My partner chose the theme for the juicers site, and the theme looks a tiny bit girlish, and it performs best of all.

The Home & Living tech site, uses a theme that I would definitely classify as male, straight lines, to the point, tight, if you see it I bet you would agree, this one performed second best.

The other two sites that have a more "male" theme perform much worst then the theme that connects to males and the other theme that connects to females.

So when you build a new site, decide whether this attracts males or females, and ask your wife or girlfriend or a slight feminim gay to help you in selecting the theme and you'll see you'll perform a lot better!