When you own an online community or dating site, you know that you never have a second chance to make first impression. Your web site design is just as important as its domain and conception. A carefully chosen template can create the right atmosphere, and put your site members in the right mood – flirty, or cheerful and ready-to-make-friends.

Did you know that a template color can greatly influence the way visitors feel about your site? There is a whole division in marketing that studies color influence on potential customers’ behavior, which can help you increase sales/attract more members to your site. In order to get the best of your dating/social networking site template, make sure it meets the color marketing principles given below.

Colors, and messages they communicate.

White – is a symbol of innocence and purity. White color chosen as a background gives your site a ‘clean’ look that does not irritate the eye. It makes the design simple and stylish, and allows you to add a large number of colorful components. White background is recommended for the sites that offer much to read on the pages.

Black – is a color of authority and power. This color evokes strong emotions, and is often associated with luxurious classics and elegance. It helps to create an atmosphere of mystery and intimacy. Too much of black color can look overwhelming. But if you add a few bright colors, your design will look catchy, colorful and attractive.

Red – is known to be a symbol of love, passion, aggression, energy and excitement. It has a stimulating effect for any kind of appetite. So if you are starting an adult dating web site, red color in your template components is a must-have.

Green – this color has calming and stabilizing effect. It is associated with health, nature and money. If your web site is health-oriented, or is about offering financial services – choosing green background or components will be a good idea.

Blue – is loved by most people. Darker shades of blue are perfect for business networks, as they symbolize trustworthiness, stability and professionalism. Light blue colors give a feeling of freshness and cleanliness, and can get your members in the careless mood.

Yellow – is a color of sunshine, happiness and laughter. It stimulates our brain to release serotonin, which gets us in the cheerful and energetic state of mind. This color used in design components and background can become a great tool for inviting new members to your social/community site.

Orange – is associated with energy, pleasure, fun and warmth. Somehow this color makes expensive products look more affordable. It vibrant and sharp enough to make your members feel anything but calmness.

Gray – represents all the solid and practical things.  Silver color, which is a hue of gray, represents high tech style. Too much of gray in web site design is sure to look dull, but adding a few gray components will give your web site a touch of solidity and seriousness that are essential for business networks.

Golden – this color is a symbol of wealth and luxury. Adding a few golden components will make your design look classy and attractive.

Once you’ve chosen the design colors that match your site conception, it’s time to think on combining them in a harmonious way.
For that we recommend to take a look at the color wheel (aka chromatic circle), and choose one of the color schemes that helps to match colors in the best way.

Monochromatic color scheme – is based on choosing colors from one color segment (for example, lighter and darker shades of green). It gives your site design an integral clean look.

Complimentary color scheme – is built on using colors that are opposite to each other on the chromatic circle. The warm-cold combination is always eye-catching. It makes your site look fresh and lively.

Analogue color scheme – is using three neighboring color segments. This combination makes design harmonious and colorful.

Triple color scheme – is about using three color segments equally standing out from each other on the color wheel (for example, red, yellow and blue). This combination looks unexpectedly stylish and pleasant to the eye.

SkaDate Dating Script has a wide range of dating and community templates for any taste and site conception. But for those who want to stand out in a crowd by developing a unique template – there is every possibility for customization, because our dating software has a 100% open source code.

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Whether or not your site is successful is determined by how populated it is. Your site members are a source of subscriptions, and are exactly what paying advertisers are always after.

The main question is how to build a members database? How to encourage people to sign up for your services when there is so much competition around? I will put Search Engine Optimization, interesting conception, attractive design and dating software platform with abundance of features aside. Let’s assume you have that all (because if you don’t – it’s hard to ever hope for success).

Basically, you can choose one of the two ways:

Populate your site with fake profiles.

We’d recommend you against creating an illusion of a busy site by integrating a fake members database. First of all, people now see way too many sites populated with model-looking members who never return messages. These days only lazy Internet surfers don’t know what a fake profile is. That is why another site full of beautiful, professional photos is likely to make them nothing more than bored and irritated. Potential users will simply not give your site any trust credit, while trust credit is something that can make your community site different, and put you ahead of competitors.

Give up an idea of integrating fake profiles for natural ways of members database building.

‘But who will want to join an empty site?’, you ask. Well, if you follow the five tips given below, the answer will be ‘Quite many potential members’:

1. Offline promotion. Don’t let your ad campaign be limited to Internet marketing, even though the largest part of your audience may be coming from the web. Offline promotion can work wonders for your site popularity, especially if it is geo-targeted. Promotional flyers, ads in your local newspaper and radio station are great tools to attract attention. You might also want to organize an event that will reflect your site conception, and give you a chance to introduce your project to potential members in person. What is especially good about offline promotion is little to no competition. So you get all the advantages of being the first to introduce yourself to an ‘offline customers segment’.

2. Promotional memberships. You don’t expect your site members to start paying right away, do you? You should first deserve

their sympathy by proving that your site is worth coming back to. Offer promitional (trial) memberships with all features and privileges included. The potential users will feel a lot more relaxed about using your services if they don’t risk anything. You can give a free lifetime membership to the first, say, 100 registered members. Or give a free trial to anyone joining your site for a limited time period. And don’t forget to put an attractive banner to your site index page with all the promotional membership advantages listed.

3. Involve your friends at the first stage of creating a members database. Ask them to register on your site, add photos and other content to their profiles. Ten to fifteen active members will be enough not to let the site look empty. That’s especially good for a social networking conception, because your friends will be able to really enjoy online communication on your site not having to imitate activity.

4. Make your site stand out in a crowd. One of the ways to do that is show that you deserve some trust credit (remember, I mentioned that before). As an option, you can show that all the profiles on your site are real, and that your members get exactly what they see. You can do that by using a photo verification tool, and marking the verified profiles as ‘authenticated’.

5. Use the referral system to attract more members to your site. Award the referrers with cash, user points (that they can spend on your site), souvenirs with your site logo (caps, t-shirts, cups, etc), movie tickets and other useful things. Viral marketing is some powerful stuff. Don’t forget to add the share options to your site pages for spreading content through social networks and bookmarking sites.

This is not an ultimate guide for members database building. You will find a lot more ways and tricks to make people visit your site, and stay a part of your community for long. The main ingredients of true popularity is your creativity and will to succeed.

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We have released another build of SkaDate Dating Software – 7.5.1933. It doesn’t include new features, and is aimed at eliminating all those little imperfections that caused you and your members any inconveniences while using the site.

Find the list of fixes and improvements below:

• Possibility for members to turn off/on the Friend Request notifications.

Surely not everyone wants to receive Friend Request notifications to their email addresses. For different reasons. We feel obliged to give your site members the right to choose.

• Ajax Chat and IM query optimization.

We have slightly increased the intervals between Ajax Chat and IM queries to ease your server load.

• Ajax Chat and IM smile set fix.

We have put the smile set in order. Now it looks just the way it should

• Adjustments for IE 8.

A few more improvements to make SkaDate Dating Script performance flawless in Internet Explorer 8.

• Possibility for members to prolong their paid membership type before the expiration date.

If your site member wants to take care of prolonging his paid membership before it expires, he can easily do that in advance.

• DreamDate template improvements.

We have made our beautiful template even better by adding an inventory line, language selection box for members, a few keys and components.

• Deleted Members thumbnail fix.

If your members happen to look through their mailbox conversation with a deleted member, they will now see a special ‘Deleted Member’ icon instead of just nothing (in Frefox) or a not-so-attractive red cross (in Internet Explorer)

• MailBox: New Message notification fix.

If a member’s message gets caught by a spam-filter, the intended receipient will not see a notification about it on the site. We thnk this will help the users avoid confusion.

• ‘Virtual Gifts’ component on the Profile View page improvement.

If your site users want to keep their virtual gifts to themselves, they can easily remove the ‘Virtual Gifts’ component from the Profile View page.

• Video Upload: configuration of the max_filesize fix.

Before, if you changed the maximum allowed file size for uploaded videos, the system could still not allow you to uoload the desired video, because cache did not clear automatically. Now it does after every max_filesize customization, so you will face no more throubles with this.

• RSS cache lifetime fix.

Checks and renews the third-party RSS feeds on a constant basis, thus keeping your content fresh and up-to-date.

• Search by miles from a certain city/zip fix.

Your members can search by miles from zip with no more issues.

• Photo view comments fix.

A member can now view the comments to his photos even if they are password-protected or ‘friends only’. We find that more than reasonable.

• Latest Activity component improvements.

Your latest activity will now display friendly URLs if you choose to enable them on your site.

• OpenInviter optimization.

We have taken over all the issues with inviting friends from Yahoo!.

• Sitemap optimization.

Now your site will become even more SEO-friendly, because your sitemap finally can include friendly URLs.

• Mouse cursor over the Facebook button fix.

That is just to show your site members that the Facebook invite button is actually clickable. The mouse cursor will indicate that.

• Status line fix.

We totally think that every member has a right to leave his status line empty.

We can’t call this build feature-oriented. But it still contributes to making SkaDate Dating Software more stable, robust and user-friendly.

We hope you enjoy using our platform!

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Let’s imagine you have already looked through a heap of dating software reviews, visited a number of vendors’ sites and narrowed your options down to a couple of noteworthy community/dating script providers. Here is what you should pay attention to when comparing software solutions to power your online dating site:

1. How long the dating software vendor has been in the market. This aspect is important because:
- The company with a long business history deserves some trust credit, because that it lasts in the competitive software market means that there is some demand for their product.
- New developed dating software is usually not even half as stable, robust and user-friendly as the one that has been polished up for years.
- A time-tested dating/community script will have a significantly larger support community, more plugins and add-ons developed for it.

2. Access to the software source code provided by the dating/community script vendor. An open source code means:
- Nearly unlimited possibilities for customization, and free branding removal. Just make sure that it is 100% open, and has no licensed or encrypted files.
- Complete data ownership. You won’t need to worry about what will happen if your dating software provider goes bankrupt, or simply abandons the product you are using for other business goals.
- Freedom from customization and support rates of the script vendor. A 100% open source code allows you to refer to any third-party programmer for assistance.

3. Participation in exhibitions and conferences, awards and other signs of recognition. If a software company participated in an industry-related exhibition, won a nomination, or its representative was assigned to speak at the conference – that should tell you something. This means that the software is reliable, the company is legitimate, and is recognized in the world of business.

4. Dating software provider’s guarantee for free bug fixing. That’s important, because shows whether the vendor is ready to take the responsibility for the product, or just wants to leave it on your shoulders.

5. Portfolio of the sites powered by the community software of your choice. One live evidence is worth a thousand words. Check the web sites built on the platform you are considering for your platform, even if they are added to be a nothing more than a testimonial. Register a profile, check the features, look through all pages to have an idea of what your future site will look like.

All those little things mean a big deal, because they indicate how trustworthy this or that dating script is. In other words, they are a guarantee to stability of your future online dating business.

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Daniel Offer, owner of the Facebook Messenger Chit Chat for Facebook, writes (Chit Chat is a Facebook Download that enables users to connect to Facebook chat from their computer’s desktop)

Many couples now meet through dating services. The premise is simple: a single person signs up, pays a regular fee, creates a profile, and then browses other singles in the area. Setting up your own dating service can be a very rewarding business prospect, but there are a few factors you should keep in mind.

1) Research the marketplace. Check out other dating services and websites to learn how they work. Do customers pay a monthly fee, or are they locked into longer contracts? Pay attention to the language used on the site and what might sound persuasive to potential customers. Note where these sites are advertising.

2) Brainstorm and form a game plan. Decide whether you want to start an online dating service or a professional match-making service. Who is your target audience? Choosing a niche market, such as a particular age group, race or religion, can help your dating service stand out from others.

3) Poll your single friends who use dating services. Take them out for lunch or a drink and get them to talk candidly about which features they like and which they dislike. Use them as a sounding board for your ideas. Your concept must be appealing to the average single in order to attract plenty of customers.

4) Establish a professional look. Order business cards, purchase a website domain and hosting services and hire a qualified web designer, if you don’t have the experience yourself. Whether your site operates as an online service or not, you should have a website to maintain credibility.

5) Advertise to attract your first customers. Post ads on websites that singles frequent, or at local clubs. Offer free memberships to your initial joiners, which will attract many more singles than a paid site that they haven’t heard of yet. Later you can switch to paid memberships once you’ve built up a buzz.

Tips

• Establish a budget before you make any plans. Start-up costs can be minimal if you do the work yourself, but you may need to hire professionals.

• Using dating software would be a great idea to structure your website.

• Network with local companies to host singles events as an opportunity to promote your dating website.

• Make the customers your number one priority. Consider offering free trials or refunds in order to stand out from the other dating sites.

• Be aware that this is a saturated market and only a few dating sites are truly successful.

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We are glad to present a new build of SkaDate Dating Software – 7.5.1877.

This time we focused on making your web site interface more attractive and user-friendly, and on adding some more cutting-edge features to keep your site competitive.

Below are the features and improvements you will find in SkaDate 7.5.1877.

USER FEATURES

Three new templates: Avatar, Dream Date, Guys

Facebook contacts import

A great tool for boosting your site popularity and attracting new members from a social networking giant Facebook.

Possibility to add RSS feeds from third-party resources

Your site members can add RSS feeds from their favourite resources right to the profile page.

Categories for video

Site Administrator can create categories for video via the Admin Panel. This will make it easier for site users to browse their favorite video clips.

Possibility to start new conversations from the Mailbox

Site users can start new conversations without leaving their mailbox. All they need to do is type-in the recipient’s username in the ‘Send message to’ field. The system suggests auto-complete options from the friends list.

Forum improvements:

- attach files to forum posts

- insert pictures to a forum post body

- send personal message from the forum post view page

ADMIN FEATURES

Notification about new member registration

Site Admins receive email notifications about the new-registered members for providing prompt profile review and support. Receiving notifications is optional, and can be easily enabled/disabled via the Admin Panel.

Classifieds items approval tool

Site Admins can set new classifieds items either for automatic or for manual approval.

SITE FEATURES

Geo-targeted advertisement

A great tool for getting the best of your ad campaign. Geo-targeted ads system allows you to choose what banners will be displayed to site visitors from different locations for maximum efficiency.

PHP 5.3 support

We have added PHP 5.3 support for SkaDate Dating Software to comply with new coding standards and keep up with the latest technologies.

FIXES AND IMPROVEMENTS

• Possibility to delete My Gifts component from My Profile page

• Possibility to limit a number of blog posts displayed on the index page

• Once a site feature is disabled, it’s no longer available in My Profile page components

• Possibility to delete/edit Classifieds categories

• Members cannot earn credits if a User Credits feature is disabled

• Members do not receive a new message notification if the message is stuck in Badwords Filter

• Possibility to add free gifts via the Admin Panel

• Custom location field is displayed in the Profiles List view mode

• Photo resolution check for the images uploaded to Classifieds section

• When editing an Event, a new line symbol is no longer replaced with <br /> tag

• 123flashchat integration improvements

We hope you will enjoy the new SkaDate Dating Software features and templates. We are proud to have taken another step towards making SkaDate a better platform for a truly entertaining, attractive, professional and competitive dating/community web site.

Feel free to check the Live Demo of SkaDate Dating Software, and ask your questions from our representatives 24/7.

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Starting an online dating/community project is always a risk. You never know for sure whether your niche or marketing strategy will be 100% successful. You cannot be absolutely sure that your expenses will be covered by site membership fees and ad spot income. These all are fair risks everyone has to take while starting their own venture.

At the same time there are risks that can be easily minimized. For example, a risk related to choosing the right dating software. Having read tons of horrifying stories about dating script providers selling malfunctioning product, people get extremely cautious about buying something they can’t touch and physically return to a shop. So how can one secure himself from being fooled while purchasing a dating software solution?

The first idea that comes to mind is to search for feedback and reviews of the company customers on the Internet. That would be a great source of impartial opinions… if at least a half of them were impartial. The problem is that tough competition in community software market often results in black PR practices aimed at slandering successful companies. Unfortunately, SkaDate Dating Software Company faced a wave of black PR not so long ago. We received numerous inquiries from discouraged and puzzled potential customers asking us to comment on all those questionable SkaDate scam reviews. That gave us some hard time, but good news is that the worst part is now behind.

The conclusion is that basically you can’t trust everything that’s written on the net. I stumbled upon an interesting comment at one of the popular IT forums: “My advice: be weary of the worst and best reviews out on the web. The worst ones are written by competing product vendors and the best ones are written by the product vendors themselves”. This rule is true for most cases. Try to find the real reviews: they are usually moderate in tone, contain facts (detailed description of bugs and problems), the real customer’s name, and (the best proof) the ’sufferer’ web site URL.

It is reasonable to pay attention to how the dating script vendor company responds to negative comments, especially to those that seem real. If the reps are rude, use abusive language, and end up blaming the customer for all the listed problems – you can be sure that after becoming a client you will be treated accordingly. If the company shows respect towards customers despite the negative review tone, replies to complaints in details, describes what measures are taken for customer satisfaction – it deserves some trust credit. If you can’t find any official feedback on negative reviews at all, the company probably doesn’t care for its reputation. Either because they are too busy developing a perfect bug-free product, or because they are not planning to stay in the market for long.

Let me finish the Internet reviews part by touching upon the community/dating software review sites. Sad truth is that many of them are affiliated. If you did some research, you might have noticed that ‘objective’ and ‘impartial’ reviews on this kind of sites aim at nothing more than praising one dating script while railing against the rest. A while ago we received a letter to our company address with the following content (for ethical reasons, we are not revealing the review web site and the software company specified in the letter):

We have to admit that looks like truth. So, again, stay vigilant, and trust your common sense only.

I will continue with the tips for minimizing the risk of picking the wrong platform for your online project in forthcoming articles.

And for now, you can share your thoughts and opinions about choosing the right community/dating script – your experience is important, and can save somebody time, trouble and money.

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Greetings,

We have come up with another update on SkaDate Dating Software ticket support service.

From now on we will be providing individual ticket support from 9 am to 6 pm (GMT +6, Monday-Friday) instead of  the previous 10 am to 7 pm schedule.

We hope you will find the new timing a little bit more comfortable, and our support service just as good.

Best regards,
SkaDate Team

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We are glad to announce that from now on all the new SkaDate customers will be getting one month of Individual Ticket Support for free. This move has been long due, and frankly, we find it more than reasonable.

Here is why.

SkaDate is a professional dating software solution. SkaDate dating script configuration tools allow you to tailor the site to your needs, and build a full-fledged social networking or traditional dating site, a niche online community or an adult network. Should I mention that its administration system may fairly seem a bit sophisticated at the start. Especially to those who had never dealt with all-that-web-stuff before.

SkaDate dating software support team will help you master the site management and configuration basics, adjust the settings to meet your needs and site conception, and learn to solve the issues on your own, without involving paid support in future.

However, if you still perfer a competent support operator to handle your site issues after the month of free support expires – we will be more than happy to assist within the monthly ticket support fee.

Check out more support options from SkaDate community and dating script: free customer support forum, manuals and video tutorials.

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SkaDate dating and community software has come up with another update – 7.5.1550. It includes new features, minor bug fixes, performance and usability enhancements.

We keep improving SkaDate dating script to meet our customers demands and online dating industry trends. Your feedback is especially important to us, and we give it a strong consideration for releasing new software builds. That is why SkaDate 7.5.1550, just like the previous revision, has a number of features implemented thanks to our customers suggestions (they are marked with a ‘User Choice’ icon).

Below is the list of new features, fixes and improvements available in SkaDate dating software build 7.5.1550:

• Improved User Points system

• New Latest Activity items

• Official safari support

• Integration of Honesty Online background check service

• Possibility to disable the ‘Latest Activity’ feature in the Admin Panel

• Possibilitiy to add emoticons to the status line on the Memberhome page

• Possibility for Site Administrator to set the number of profiles displayed in the ‘Friends List’

• Usability improvements:

• Bug fixes:

We suggest that you take a look at a brief description of the most eye-catching features and changes.

Improved User Points system:

Site members have significantly more opportunities for spending user points now. The User Points system has become a complete replacement for Credits membership type with even more opportunities and greater flexibility.

We have also added a possibility for users to earn points by taking certain site actions, such as:
- profile picture upload
- daily login
- points on member’s Birthday
- first profile registration
- voting in polls
- friend invitation

Site Administrator can give points to users manually via the Admin Panel.

Members receive email notifications every time they get more user points to their credit balance.

User Points system settings can be easily configured in the Admin Panel, which makes it a powerful tool for your dating site monetization.

New Latest Activity items:

We have added more items to the Latest Activity feature. The list has been extended to include updates on:
- new group creation
- new video upload
- new comments for Video, Photo, Blog Post, Group, Profile, Event

Official safari support

We have optimized SkaDate PHP dating script for Safari Internet browser. At the moment SkaDate script supports Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Mozilla Firefox 3 and higher, Google Chrome and Safari. Now your site members can enjoy their online dating experience in all the popular Internet browsers.

Integration of Honesty Online background check service

Honesty Online is a widely-recognized identity verification service that has proved itself to be a great tool for fighting against Internet fraud and scamming. It works for your site trustworthiness and credible reputation.

Honesty Online provides background check services for your dating site members willing to prove their identity. By paying a certain amount and going through a verification process, they get a verified identity Credential that can be used at any online transactions and interaction.

By integrating Honesty Online with SkaDate dating script we have taken one more step towards making online dating experience safer both for site owners and users.

Possibility to disable the ‘Latest Activity’ feature in the Admin Panel:

A very useful option for the site owners holding up to traditional dating site conception.

Possibilitiy to add emoticons to the status line on the Memberhome page:

Now your site members have even more ways to express themselves: they can post textual updates to the status line accompanied by a great set of emoticons.

Possibility for Site Administrator to set the number of profiles displayed in the ‘Friends List’

Site Administrator can now control the number of friends displayed in a ‘Friends List’ profile component so that it would look best anywhere on the Profile View page.

Check the new features of SkaDate dating and community software at the Live Demo, and ask your questions from our pre-sales team 24/7. We are always glad to assist.

Best regards,
SkaDate Team

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