We've been trying out some dating sites over the past few weeks to see if any of them are any good! There's four of us - David 28, Amanda 24, Phil 34 and Debbie 37. We signed up to a number of sites: we wanted to know if the paid for sites are any better than the free ones or whether they were a waste of money. Were the members on the sites real!? Could we meet a few people offline for some dates? What would happen? Did we solve the credit crunch? These, and many more questions, we will try and answer now and also in the future as we keep on plugging away with our online dating memberships!

We decided to give Lavalife a try! It’s not as well known as some of the major players, and it’s bigger in the US than in the UK. Despite that, there was a pretty huge selection of UK members. Debbie managed to get three dates in the space of three weeks! None of them led to anything more but so far it’s fun and worth persevering with. Watch this space for more info as it unfolds!

Just wanted to add that, unlike most other sites, Lavalife offers three separate “communities”, allowing you to choose depending on the type of relationship you would like, whether long term or casual. They also let you reply to messages that you receive for free!

Sometimes we get annoyed with false promises from online dating sites that just want to get your money but then offer a fairly useless site with poor service and lack of active members - ie. members that are regular users and plenty of them. We found though that Match.com is a cut above the rest. They started in America and were one of the first online dating sites to hit the web. They are now massive in the UK too - no.3 in fact in terms of size. There’s a massive database of members and we liked the fact that you’d see lots of new people every time you logged on. we also liked their customer service which, unlike most dating sites, can be contacted by phone and not just online.

“Winks” are now becoming a common feature on dating sites. We couldn’t really see much point though. It’s not the same as sending a message where your personality can come across. Match has a winks feature and when we tried it we didn’t get much in the way of anything back. we had more luck with emails! Phil did quite well, getting an inbox with messages from around a dozen women within the first three days! Match’s subscription rates are typical for online dating. On Match.com it costs £22.80 for one month, £45.65 for three months (works out to £15.22 per month) and £65.25 for six months (£10.88 per month). The six month membership seems a bit steep but we suppose that it does offer the best value and anyway in most cases you probably need more than a month to “find someone”. By the way, Match.com offer a guarantee with their six month membership - if you don’t find anyone you get another six months for free. We like that!

We asked our friend, Ben, who is a journalist, to write a “top 10 tips” article for our site which we thought might be helpful to you, our reader! So, here’s Ben’s article:

Online Dating
Top Ten Tips for Guys
by Ben Janus in collaboration with Datingsite

1. Girls often say “looks don’t matter”, or “it’s personality that counts”. So how comes they won’t talk to you simply because you don’t have a photo on your profile!? We rest our case!

2. You think your “copy and paste” message will impress the women? Uhuh! Don’t think so. If you are going for the mass marketing approach, at least make your copy and paste message sound unique. better still, just add a line to it that’s specific to the girl you’re contacting!

3. Think neuro-linguistic-programming. Works for Ros Jeffries and it can for you. think about the words you use when contacting someone. Read their profile. pick up on key words and fire back variations of them to build up an emotional connection from their point of view.
 

4. Sometimes you get a load of meaningless and unthoughtful rubbish from a woman who writes to you. Don’t feel the need to retaliate. At best, you’d be wasting your time, at worst you’ll get banned from the site.

5. If you think that an ongoing correspondence will improve your prospects, think again. there’s no point. You could be writing to someone for months only to find that when you meet it’s a huge disappointment. Don’t waste your time. Ask a woman out at the earliest of either 3-5 email exchanges or two weeks, whichever is the earliest. It’ll sort out the women who want to meet from the timewasters.

6. Women often say “no pervs”! Sure they do. What they mean is don’t send them a pic of your knob attached to your first message. Or don’t ask them what they like in bed or what you’d like to do with their arse. It’s not to say they are not interested, because they are, oh yes indeed, but there’s a time and a place, and it isn’t the initial email exchange.

7. Be respectful, be sincere, and understand that a woman, just like a man in fact, has feelings! No need to hurt them. But equally, don’t take any crap either! If a woman is a timewaster, and quite a lot of them are on online dating sites, don’t let them waste your time. Move on to someone worth your time.
 

8. Unfortunately, online dating, just like real life, is stacked in a female’s favour when it comes to relationships and dating. Women get hundreds of potential chasers, so they can sit back, pick and chose. Us guys have to do the chasing. So if you don’t get replies from every woman you write to, don’t lose sleep over it.

9. Choose a good site. Mind you, a lot of them prey on the vulnerabilty of singledom. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We’d suggest try some free sites first, and then move onto some paid ones once you’ve got the jist. Try not to get ripped off though. look carefully at the price plans, auto renewal terms and conditions and compare different paid sites.

10. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t let yourself get addicted. take a break for a few weeks, go to the pub or read a book, ie. do something else for a while!

Top Tip - Life is too short to be looking from the outside! If you’ve never  used an online dating site, pick one you like the look of and give it a whirl! might be worth a visit!

We saw a tv show about Sexy Russian Woman Phil’s signed up! Good luck mate! On ""Match.com"" we got a 72 Hour Free Trial Helpful to try for free! You could also try FriendFinder which has got a huge selection of members!

2. Match.com

1. Lavalife.com

3.

Love and friends has been around for a few years now. It’s become one of the most addictive UK dating sites with a really loyal membership base. In depth profiles, lots of interesting/advanced features and loads of great like-minded people to interact with. Loveandfriends is a very high quality UK dating site. They are focussed on graduates and professionals and have over 75,000 active members.

They regularly advertise in quality and professional magazines and newspapers. So you’ll see their ad every Saturday in the Guide in the Guardian and in the review section of the Observer on Sunday. A quick search will reveal a mix of professionals who seem genuine in looking for a relationship. Debbie and Phil who signed up said that they were pleased with the quality of members and the fact that a lot of them seemed to be in their thirties age group. We recommend this site and include it as no.3 in our list!

4. UK Dating

This is a lesser known site with a smaller membership than the likes of match.com but we found it quite vibrant. The members seemed to be a bit younger than loveandfriends.com and more mixed. The search features were quite good and we didn’t take long in narrowing down a good selection of people to write to. The other good thing about this dating site was that, unlike match, it is exclusively UK based. We like that as sometimes we find the big US sites don’t always speak our language. We do think though that as far as online dating is concerned it’s a good idea to join a few different sites because they do offer a slightly different experience and you’ll also get different cross sections of people.

David and Amanda subscribed to UK Dating and had a good “strike rate”! Amanda gets a lot of interest and goes out on dates fairly regularly. David’s done quite well too. He’s sort of seeing someone “casually” but still using the site. So is the girl he met from the site who is also continuing to go on dates with new people. This is dating New York style - dating a la “Sex in the City” where it’s perfectly acceptable to “date” a handful of people until you finally feel you’ve met the “right one” and can then show more commitment!

Actually we should point out that the five online dating sites recommended on this page are not in order of preference! We have used and like all of them and DatetheUK is no exception. David used it a couple of years ago and recently subscribed again for the benefit of research for this online dating site guide (and because he’s single and looking to meet someone!). He hasn’t yet found the girl of his dreams although he did get laid! Twice! Talking of which so did Debbie! Apart from that she says she’s had some really great dates and likes the mix of people on the site.

5.
DatetheUK.com

Overall we rate DatetheUK very highly. It’s very well run with good search capabilities and lots of interesting members. And given the experiences of our testers it looks like there’s lots of fun to be had. If you just decide to subscribe to only one dating site for now, then you could do a lot worse than join this one. Gets the thumbs up from us!