By BBC News Online's Jenny Matthews

According to recent figures, women make up at least 35% of UK web users, and the number is growing so fast that female surfers will soon outnumber their male counterparts.

So it figures that the number of sites aimed specifically at women has begun to proliferate.

And, according to the providers, it's "lifestyle" features such as health, gossip and horoscopes that women really want from the web.

The latest big launch, Beme.com, which is run by magazine publisher IPC, appears to have grander intentions. It bills itself as an "information life source" for "universal modern women".

Media director at IPC, Hilary Burden, calls it "a beautiful place to be" as well as being easy to navigate.

But that sort of talk is demeaning to women, according to Jules, creator of the independent women's site PlanetGrrl.

"Most 'women's sites' in the UK seem to be under the misconception that women find the web very difficult to navigate. Our experience is this is clearly not the case," she says.

She added that most women's sites were "boring, patronising and stereotypical".

Caroline Sceats, business analyst at internet research company Fletcher Research, says many sites foolishly treat "women" as a single group.

"Women aren't a niche market and it's time online publishers stopped treating them as if they were," she says.

Part of the problem, says Sceats, is that many new sites are being offered by existing offline publishers, rather than truly innovative businesses.

"They're using traditional business models, trying to move a business model online which is aimed at protecting their existing territory."

Maxine Benson, co-founder of Everywoman.co.uk, a site aimed specifically at women starting a business and a family, thinks the most successful sites are narrowly targeted.

They also recognise that women use the web very differently from men.

"They don't go surfing in the same way men do," she says.

"[Women] tend to spend their day trying to find solutions. They don't have the luxury to spend time, and even money, on the web."

This could be the reason why many sites try to offer so much easy-accessed information, that they end up looking, in the words of one journalist, like a "cross between teletext and a fruit machine".

Nevertheless, recent research bears out the fact that women and men display different behaviour when it comes to using the web.

A Fletcher Research poll of 50,000 internet users at the end of last year found both genders saw e-mail as their primary reason for going online.

But women said the second reason was "to help me or my family's education," while men's secondary reason was for "fun and entertainment".

Cost factor

In the US, women's sites tend to be bigger and more entertainment-driven, and invite the reader to spend a lot more time surfing.

That could be because the internet is much cheaper, suggests Benson.

"In the States you can go online for as long as you like, it's about 12 cents, you're not restricted by costs," she says.

"Although even if net access became cheaper in the UK, women's surfing wouldn't change that much - we simply have different priorities".

Whatever the drawbacks and benefits of women-specific sites, the growth of women surfers is likely to have a profound impact on the web as a whole.

Alison Loudon, an Edinburgh-based business angel, says many well-established, cross-gender sites will have to start evolving.

At the moment, many have a "certain male orientation in their presentation," and would have to change when they realised more than half of their users could be female.

More than that, all commercial sites would have to ensure their delivery of goods and information was up to speed, if they wanted women to return.