Which Internet Dating Site?

The Internet is packed with a dazzling array of dating and internet dating services. Some of these are of fantastic quality, offering exciting and often mildly addictive methods for contacting and meeting people you almost certainly would never reach in the normal scheme of things, some are run on a much smaller scale, offering little more than a "post-your-picture-and-see-what-happens" service. There are also those services (which are exclusively free) which are little more than yet another way of getting your details so that they or their commercial partners can attempt to sell you products. Let's be clear here; there's nothing wrong with these "fun" sites, some of them are appealing and a great diversion, but if you're looking for a life long spouse, you're probably going to search on long time if you limit yourself to this last type of site.

Do's And Don'ts When Choosing An Internet Dating Site

Do

• Consider joining more than one site - you'll increase your chances of meeting someone. It needn't cost you a great deal if you are canny in the way you use the sites.
• Post a profile - if you're a heterosexual woman, you'll get a large number of responses, especially initially. It's worth doing this whether you're a man or a woman, because even if you've contacted someone yourself, the person you've contacted will probably want to find out a little about you before going any further and the easiest way of doing this is to be able to be able to click on your profile.

• Be prepared to contact other members, ESPECIALLY if you're a heterosexual man. Men outnumber women significantly on internet dating sites, so if you are male and choose only to post a profile, you may not get a large number of responses. Take the initiative and contact the people you like, but check out the site's database to be sure there is a sufficient number of high quality contacts to be worth your while before shelling out money.

• Try to find out as much as possible about member statistics before you commit yourself. We've found that some sites are more than a little liberal in their interpretation of how many members or users they have. Calculations can include the number of members that have ever subscribed to the site or even the number of "hits" the site has had. What you're interested in is the number of active members on the site; that is, the number of people who are actually using the site on a regular basis - a common rule of thumb for defining "active" is those who've visited the site at least once in the last 30 days. Many sites don't lay this information out for you (they are especially cagey about their male:female ratio), but you can get an idea by doing a search for the type of people you're looking for, then checking out individual profiles for information about when they became members or when they last visited the site.

Dont

• Pay to join a site that won't let you browse its membership database first - you want to know if they have people you're interested in before you cough up money.
• Turn your nose up at smaller specialist sites e.g Latino, Asian, Russian, mail order brides, senior singles sites. These are often good value for money, sometimes have special features (e.g Spanish/English real time chat translation), and if you're looking for someone with particular characteristics, these sites may do the job better than the more generalist sites.