UK Dating
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Choosing an Online Dating Site
Firstly, decide what you are looking for – romance, a life partner, fun, chat, video dating, friendship, pen pals, business networking or just plain old sexual encounters. You can even find a tennis partner. Or, indeed, all of the above!
Do you want prospective dates to come from a particular country or area? Are you willing to pay, or do you prefer to join free dating sites? Whatever it is, there is a dating/social website out there for you.
Most dating directories will categorise the dating sites they list, so half the work is done for you. But not all the work.
When we write a review we try to indicate what kind of membership a dating site has and what facilities it offers so that you don’t have to waste time clicking through to sites that are unsuitable.
Many dating websites are “catch all” sites and have a variety of members with different objectives. Most of the free dating sites are like this. This means you have to be more discriminating when reading profiles if you don’t want to waste time communicating with someone who is looking for something completely different from you.
If you want to leave less to chance, there are dating sites that target a specific membership. For example Perfectmatch.com is an international dating site for 25-55 year old singles who are serious about finding a life partner and to that end they have detailed compatibility profiles and a sophisticated matching system. On the other hand www.indianmatrimonialnetwork.com will not be useful to you unless you are an Indian single looking for marriage.
Even after you have looked at the options, you will still be left with quite a long list of dating sites that are for you. With the free ones, you can join them all – after all it doesn’t cost anything other than time! But with the pay dating sites, then finance becomes an issue at around £10 to £30 for each site per month.
Luckily, almost all pay dating sites with allow you to register for free, enabling you to look around the site and see who else is registered, even if you are not allowed to make contact with anyone. Even better, some pay sites offer a free trial. So our advice is to join as many as you feel you can and choose which ones to stay with later on.
However, joining a dating site can be fairly time consuming. To streamline the business, we suggest you create a text document with the following information. You can then copy and paste the details onto your registration form.
1. On screen name. Choose one that is not likely to have been taken up by anyone else or you will have to go back and choose another. Irritating!
2. email address. If you are trying out several dating sites we suggest you get a dedicated email address (eg Yahoo! or Hotmail) to deal with the inevitable flood of emails. Also, this will allow you to keep all your registration details together in one place.
3. Password
4. Your profile. There is usually a minimum number of characters of around 100 you have to enter so get it ready beforehand. This is a real time saver.
5. A description of the kind of person you are interested in meeting. Not all sites ask for this but as some do, it is a good idea to have one ready.
6. The location on your computer of the photo you want to upload. You probably won’t want to bother with this until you are sure this is a dating site you want to join.
Lastly, a note about billing on pay dating sites. Many, but not all, have what is known as an automatic re-billing policy. If you join for, say, 3 months then, at the end of the 3 months, your credit card will be automatically debited with another 3 months membership fee UNLESS you tell them otherwise by canceling your membership. We try to indicate on the review if a site automatically re-bills, but please check the fine print anyway as we are not infallible!
Copy and paste
Using the left hand mouse button simply highlight the text you want to copy, let go of the mouse button (it will stay highlighted) and then press control + c on the keyboard simultaneously. This copies the text to the clipboard on your computer. To paste this into another document, click on the part of the document you want to paste to and then press control + v.
This article is courtesy of The Dating Atlas
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