Making a Dating Site

Gunit · #1 02-09-2007, 01:25 AM

I was wondering what would it take to make a functional dating site. What would be the best software to use when developing it and how would the hosting work and what other probelms and concerns would there be.

I know this is way over my head, just wondering if you guys had any advice.

KidLifeCrisis · #2 02-09-2007, 01:34 AM

Hey Gunit,

I'm working on a dating site right now called Black Book Singles. It's not up yet, but it's fairly well along. I posted a bit about it in another thread.

A lot of the basic things like messaging and adding to favorites were pretty simple.

The hardest part (which I'm still tweaking) involves the registration and searching aspects with regards to geocodes and radial distance. When entering a location for your profile, I do a lookup against the Yahoo! Maps API. If it finds a match, I cache that data into my database so that I can find the data again quickly without having to reference Yahoo. This is good because I want searches to be quick, and also because you can only make a limited number of geocode requests to Yahoo per day.

The searching is fairly difficult because you have to correctly parse what the person is searching for before checking the database. In other words, you have to find out if they're trying to search by [city, state] or [city, country] or [zipcode] or whatever, then search the appropriate DB fields. (This would be much simpler for a single-country dating site, but I made mine multi-country.)

Hope that helps.

Gunit · #3 02-09-2007, 01:41 AM

What about hosting something like this?

Thanks a lot fot your help

WarBus · #4 02-09-2007, 01:54 AM

Finding a dating site script isn't too difficult. Search
Getting it up and tweaking it to your tastes may require some help from a coder/programmer. This would still be easy and relatively inexpensive.

The hard part is getting people to find the site and then use the site.

How do you get people to sign up if there isn't anyone to meet?
Its a Catch-22.

How do you market your site and get people to notice it?
There are a lot of dating sites. Some are paid, some are converting to free, some are already free, some cater to everyone, some aim for a particular niche. Regardless of the type, most have some pretty hefty advertising budgets.

majesty2009 · #5 02-09-2007, 01:58 AM

If you are interested in making a dating site go here

http://www.tufat.com/s_free_dating_system.htm

Misfire · #6 02-09-2007, 04:34 AM

[ QUOTE ]
How do you get people to sign up if there isn't anyone to meet?

[/ QUOTE ]

Fake profiles obv.

RollTheDice777 · #7 02-09-2007, 09:34 AM

I made a social networking site, and the first thing I did was to tell my friends to sign up. After that, I used Google adwords, but be aware of what countries you target. I had only a little over 100 people on my site, and a couple of days after buying ads, I had 6 different nigerian scams going throughout the site. So if you are just starting out, be sure to add all the appropriate privacy and administration tools from the start.