My wife is obsessed with Pinkisthenewblog.com. My brother, on the other hand, would rather visit PerezHilton.com. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, these are celebrity gossip websites. They're a big hit with consumers as well as advertisers. And, for the most part, they're a stable and established bunch.

But recently, a new player has emerged. Unlike the aforementioned blogs, this one is run not by an enterprising individual, but by MSN. But, despite its corporate backing, wonderwall.com's look and feel is decidedly cool.


As its name suggests, Wonderwall.com gives you with all the celebrity gossip you can stomach, presented in a mosaic of pictures that expand to reveal an abstract or the full story as you roll over and click then, respectively. The whole site scrolls horizontally, setting its functionality apart from virtually every other celebrity gossip site in a standard vertical blog.

While I have almost no interest whatsoever in celebrity gossip, I found myself poking around wonderwall.com much longer than I planned on. The layout allows you to see many more stories at once than in a vertically scrolling blog, and allows you to read little snippets about each story without clicking to commit to reading the whole thing.

Here at Meyer & Wallis, and especially on this blog, we regularly argue that content drives the internet. Content brings customers to your website. New content will bring them back.

But it also helps to have a slick interface.

Only a few months old, wonderwall.com now ranks 4th in traffic among celebrity gossip sites, and the length of time that visitors spend at wonderwall.com puts other gossip sites to shame.

So it seems that wonderwall.com's winning combination is great, regularly updated content, and a quick, appealing, informative interface. That's harder than you might think, and as an internet ad agency, it's fun to see it done well.

If you're struggling to find the right balance of style and substance to bring new and returning customers to your website, we can help. Click to the right to shoot us an email, or give us a call today.