As Editor Zed endeavours to meet the needs of our (roughly) defined 16-55 year-old users, we've established that what our target users want is content that is relevant (informing and engaging) and accessible.
While relevant content may already exist, accessibility often fails. Cyberfeminist blogs exist, but have failed to recognise the need for clean, minimalistic designs necessary for online content consumption.
A feature posted on Feminist.com demonstrates the need for layout specifically designed for online. They've used slabs of text with few hyperlinks and multimedia to break up the text, potentially deterring readers from continuing. They've also used a confronting background colour that distracts from the text.
Likewise, an article featured on OBN (a cyberfeminist alliance website) has a similar effect to the feminist article aforementioned above. With more long-winded paragraphs and dissonant background and font colours, it is apparent little thought has gone into the design process for pages other than the landing page.
While their content may be academically relevant, it isn't engaging. Despite its focus on online feminism, they may be catering to a distinct user group from our own. We aspire to blogs that reference popular culture and phenomena that users are either familiar with or would appreciate.
A blogs that is similar in style, but divergent in content is:

Figure 1.1 Mamamia.com.au (retrived August 30 2011)
Mamamia, written by Mia Freedman, comments on social trends and has a very similar target user as our own. We could potentially leverage off this site as she has been known to help local writers - and we'd mutually link her back.
Our target users want to engage with feminist discussion in a way that is culturally relevant to their lives. As we continue our research, we'll find topical issues that interest them and us and do so in a way that the design facilitates easy reading against a 'noiseless' background.
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