Periodically I purge my profile from all dating sites. It’s refreshing on a personal level and and a good idea for my consulting business.
Recently I deleted myself from all paid dating sites and all free sites except PlentyOfFish and OKCupid (a guy’s gotta date). I was spending thousands of dollars a year on dating site fees, which doesn’t make as much sense for me these days. I also wanted to go through the signup process at several sites for a research project I’m working on.
I’ve decided on a new policy. If you want me to look at, review or otherwise pay attention to your dating site, you should create a username and password and send it to me. If you don’t have to, don’t fill out my profile, just create an account so I can log in, poke around and get a sense of your site. If your site is subscription-based, create and account with a month free or three.
This may sound lazy, but I get at least 20 emails a week from dating sites asking for feedback or a mention and these days I’m all about time management. That’s an hour or more of my time spent slogging through signup forms and I want that hour back to work with clients, blog more and continue my industry and media outreach, which is going incredibly well these days.
Soon enough we’ll have a unified profile to use on most dating sites and this won’t be necessary, right?
Send the url, username and password via the contact form.
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While our site GiveAndDate just launched last week for NYC — and is definitely still in beta with plenty of changes ahead — I’m pretty sure we have one of the most painless sign-up processes out there as we use OpenID. I would love to get some feedback if anyone wants to sign-up and explain if there were any points where you stumbled in the process.. just click on the Feedback button (Get Satisfaction) and shoot us a message.
David,
Don’t you think that testing sign up form is an essential part of evaluating a dating site? For some (like eHarmony) it’s reasonable to keep the signup mile-long while some others should keep it as simple as possible.
Our customers at SkaDate demand to have a super-flexible sign-up process. One trend that keeps floating around is that lengthy forms often hold users from signing up. It may be done on purpose (as a filter) or by error – and it critically reduces sign-up rate.
All in all sign-up form on a dating site is the first and one of the most important interaction tools to work with a potential dater.
If you will sign up for me and provide screenshots for 20+ sites a week I’d be grateful ;-)
haha, sorry. Fire me from this job.
facebook = not-too-distant future universal signon.
i signedup for 3 services yesterday (not dating) and didn’t have to create an account because i clicked “connect with facebook”. Yes, I know this can be done many other ways with Open ID, etc., however, this one is the MOST familiar and easy for people to use.
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