i need to know how to design a dating web site?

Question

i have just aqired a dating web site that is insuficent for our customers needs, it is very primitive. i need to know a reliable web master, also is it possible to get the apropriate software and design it myself? how hard would it be? please only serious answers.

Answer 1

If you have a knack for it and are willing to work hard you can come up to speed with PHP fairly quickly. There are numerous templates and classes availible that make even something as complex as a dating site bearable.



For now, I would suggest patching problems on the current site and evaluating what you want to do.



Some considerations. Hosting on LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) is going to give you more power, fewer security problems, and better performance. The user base of support cannot be beaten. There are so many good PHP programers out there that you can almost always find help with a problem in a very short time. MySQL runs some of the busiest websites in the world including Slashdot which is also hosted on Linux using Apache. The term to be slashdotted is a term to mean swamped by sudden traffic and that is a testiment to the huge amount of traffic that LAMP can handle.



Most importantly is it's free. So that makes your endeavor more profitable. So I strong recomend moving to LAMP if you are not using it. However build it and test it BEFORE you move. You want to preserve continuety, especially with a site like a dating site.



There are many ways a dating site will fail or suceed. Primarily you want to get people talking to people. The more this happens the better your service will be viewed. You also want to able create filters to prevent people from wasting too much time with people they KNOW they don't want to meet. Weight being a huge one. Smoking, drinking, religion, ethnicity, height and age are big filters that you should support. If a person hates smoking so much that they will not date a smoker, why even have them show up in smoker's searchs? Contact from smokers are unwelcome contact for these people. So you want to set things up where they do not normally contact each other but have the capability to do so if they are a friend of a friend kind of thing.



Then you have powerfull things that you can create to encourage meeting. Remember your site will be judged on the quanity and quality of the people that it's members meet. If there are too few contacts people lose interest. If the people who they are meeting are completely wrong they will try somewhere else. I have quite a few ideas on this topic and would be happy to explain in detail.



As for taking over being webmaster, that is probably a bad idea initially. You can find free or inexpensive help. You can learn from them, but marketing is probably going to eat up all your time. Depending on your server costs this can be a substantial figure and you don't want it eating up your financial resources. There are some ways to market for dirt cheap. They are time consuming however. Something that if you really want this to succeed you need to. Put the effort in and stick with it for a time and you can easily climb to the top of the hill. So many dating sites today are fly by nights or so wrapped up in past success that they throttle thier own future success. I am talking from experience. I met my ex-fiance on a dating site. One that I cannot even log into anymore because it doesn't support my browser/OS. I was a paid member there for six months about 5 years ago. Most of the other sites I tried around that time no longer exist.



Please do contact me. I think I can be of help with this endeavor in many ways.

Answer 2

With all respect, unless you're fluent in systems design, database administration, server- and client-side scripting, web design, and various markup languages, your best bet is to contact a professional. While simple page layout with static content is fairly easy (deceptively so when using programs like Frontpage or Dreamweaver), what you're discussing here is a full website with backend systems requirements, and that's not something a layman's going to have a whole lot of success with unless they've got a lot of time to ramp up on the technologies involved. As an example, user logins:



A properly implemented user login feature (which would be absolutely required in your example of a dating website) requires all of the following:



User input forms



Server-side scripting to do all of the following:

- sanitize any input from the user

- validate the user (ie. verify the username and password are correct)

- interact with the database during validation, user creation, password recovery, password resets, account deactivation, etc.



A database (yes you can get away with stashing data in XML files but that quickly gets ridiculous, especially in this instance)



And all of this is just to get your users account created and get them logged into the website, we haven't even gotten to user profiles, messaging, forums, etc.



My advice would be to do a quick search for web design firms in your local area and contact them for an estimate for a site overhaul. If they're too pricey you can also consider hiring a professional web developer and keeping them in-house to maintain/upgrade the site.



Good luck!

Answer 3

While you could definitely acquire the necessary software and design a site by yourself, I would not recommend such a course. It would result in an inferior website, one that could be easily trumped by those of your competitors. Designing a good and effective website is something that takes creativity, technical expertise, and experience. While you could save some money up front by doing the design yourself, in the long run it will only hurt you more.