Dating sites and the 21st century

Dating Sites And The 21st Century...Or How It All Began...By Damien Brodel
Okay, let's face it - there are obviously millions of people using dating sites. What's important here is the number, not their objectives or reasons. Not a regular dating site user myself, I have friends who spend A LOT of time on such places. I suppose the emotional aspect of that can not be described in words and one has to hook up to it in order to understand it. But nevertheless, it seems to feel like a part of the lifestyle for some, say, a few hundred million users.
For the regular dating site user, looks and sounds of the site are not the most important part of it. But for people like me, who spent last 10 years working on design, branding and identity projects, it does. And it does not need much observation to see what I am talking about - just take a look at couple of ugly sites that has a counter showing users that are currently online or how many members from your country are there. Just go to Google and run a search for "dating site" - you will get the idea right from the first page.
This will only show you that users are not much interested in the visual or aesthetical aspects of a site once they find the fun of it. Disregarding the fact that dating sites are usually well visited, the truth is they seem to be stuck in the past century. They look and feel outdated.
Sure, that seems not to be affecting their profits in the very same way as ugliness does not affect eBay's, but in the time when people are talking about web 2.0, how long will it be okay to keep your crappy looks just because your users got used to it?
When the idea of creating our own dating site came, we went through tens of dating sites to check out the competition and plan our startup tactics. Along with the competition, we conducted a research on the existing dating site backends, as a major milestone was to choose whether we are going to use a third party application or write our own. Once we had enough information and impressions, we sat down and brainstormed the hell out of us. Each one of us shared his thoughts and impressions. Then we draw the line (sorry if there is something you already know, but it will do you no harm to go over it again):
1. There are two general types of dating sites - free and paid. Free sites are getting profits by running third party advertising campaigns; paid are run by charging people monthly or yearly subscription.
2. There are quite a lot of third party products to build your dating site with. Both free and commercial.
3. There are few big players on the scene we can't compete with at this point.
4. There are a lot of smaller dating sites we can easily outperform if we plan our strategy right.
5. Dating business is a win-win kind of business - no matter how many new dating sites come out - users will always join as many of them as they like, but will still keep their membership to previously used sites. Or at least on the free ones.
6. Loosing a member is not because the competitor is a bastard, but because the user is bored with your service.
7. Making your dating site popular does not necessarily mean you should target top position in search engines and pay a bunch of money on SEO. At least not right from the start. There are plenty of free marketing alternatives and what's even better - more are coming on a constant basis.
8. Today's dating sites don't rely much on the looks.
9. Today's dating sites don't rely much on the name either. Yesterday I landed on a site called Herpes Dating. HERPES!? Are you for real!?
10. Most of today's dating sites sport a generic set of features.
11. Most of today's dating sites stop developing once they make a fair ammount of members.
12. In general, a great lot of today's dating sites look like crap, sound like it and do not give a damn about it.
After we analysed this information, we came to the following conclusions:
1. There always be a niche for new dating sites. Coming up with well-thought, good looking, appealing and catchy site however puts you in a flying start position. Getting your site noticed by design galleries and into discussions acts as a free initial marketing campaign. Not to mention the fact that it's way better to have a good looking site than crappy looking one.
2. If you want to build a website that stands above the rest, you should go for a custom solution rather than using a generic one. This does not necessarily need to be MUCH more expensive. For example there are lots of features in some sites we found useless and thus not implementing initially in DateYard. Which gives us two benefits - 1. keeping the cost low for the startup; and 2. adding new features to the site in future will allow us to constantly develop, which will strenghten our members' loyalty in our service because this way we will show we care about them.
3. Having a site that looks good and feels different will certainly bring some attention to it right from the start, which is a good move as we did not have marketing budget at all and thus needing to popularize the site in alternative ways. This is also useful as this way we will always be researching and enriching ourselves with information on the latest internet marketing and branding techniques.
So it all began as an experiment. The results will either be that DateYard will be the start of a new era in online dating business, or it will simply prove that ugly sites with stupid names and no branding whatsoever are preferred by today's internet-using Pavlov dogs.
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