New Dating Website

[mitchy]

I recently read about the success of plentyoffish creator Markus Frind. I became very inspired and I have a good idea for a niche dating site that is pretty much untapped. I have looked all over the internet and there are tons of companies who sell scripts for dating sites or dating site builder programs etc. I dont have much money at the moment so I searched for free dating scripts and I finally found one that seems legit. The only problem is I have no knowledge of coding or servers at all. I dont even know where to begin and how to actually start using the script to build my dating site. I have hosting with hostgator by the way. Are there any beginners guides out there to learn how to do this? Any help is appreciated.

[wangjianshuo]

@Mitchy, I am trying not to discourage you, but my advice is, the chance to run a very good dating site without technical skills is not easy. Look at Frind, and Craig of Craigslist, they are all engineer turned businessman, who can write codes. So you may need to find someone as partner to help you, if you still want to keep the overhead to run the business low.

[mitchy]

that makes total sense. I am still optimistic though because I now plan on using drupal to help put my site together

[maximillianos]

Drupal is a very technical CMS. Most of the customizations must be done in PHP. I've read Joomla is a bit more user-friendly for non-tech folks.

[londrum]

i was thinking that normal forum software might do the job quite well. if you think about it, you can have each 'forum' as a category of person -- men, women, or whatever -- and people can register and post their details in the forums. if you customise the posting form to include other fields, then you could have them enter all the necessary details and pictures.
the PM system is already set up for people to get in touch with them. you'd just have to amend the rules that allow them to do it.
and you can turn off replies, so each 'post' looks like a solitary advert.
and you can then use the forum software to automatically purge the posts after a few weeks.
if you put paying customer into a special group, then you easily give them added bonuses, like the ability to upload a picture, or sticky their ad to the front

[mitchy]

thank you max, im definitly going to check out joomlan if it is more user friendly cause i have no coding skills and no extra time to learn

[oasisfan]

Ever since the plentyof fish story broke I have seen more and more Free dating sites. In Australia they have just launched oasis.

If yours is a good niche thing then go for it but it seems a crowded market.

I think the iphone will be a good pltaform to develop a dating site on.

It has the GPS so you could see who was in your immediate area at any given time.

[Shimrit]

"It has the GPS so you could see who was in your immediate area at any given time"

Big can of worms, if you ask me. Back when I used to work for a dating company, we kept getting approached by companies that wanted us to adopt mobile technology so our members could find each other while they were out and about. We never took it up because we didn't want to be spearheading what could end up in some serious stalking issues.

As a woman, even if I was actively looking for someone, I'd *never* give out my immediate location to anyone without serious scrutiny.

[skibum]

I'd bet plentyoffish gets a HUGE chunk of its revenue from the paid dating sites. I'm sure it does a chunk in AdSense as well.

[topr8]

a long time back, marcus actually posted on WebmasterWorld a very detailed account of how he did it, imo one of the best ever threads here,

... despite the article about him now being a millionaire and only working an hour a day, which has sparked so much interest in starting your own dating site, he did the groundwork in an extremely methodical and clever way.