Hi,

I run a niche dating and friendship site for the past three years.  I converted it from Webdate to Skadate (Managed Hosting) last year.  The new software was not welcomed by everyone and I had to work hard to retain many members while bugs and other problems were sorted out. I also run two other niche sites using Boonex Dolphin v5.6.  Lately the conversions have dropped on the Skadate site from about 5+% to 3% or less.  I'm still getting the same level of traffic and sign ups but not the conversions.

I sometimes wonder if the days of paying sites from small independent webmasters running vanilla sites is coming to end when you see the amount of free software now available which you can use to run a community site or social network.

Are there any other vanilla website owners in this forum and if so, what do you think?

I would also like to hear from anyone using all the Chuppo features.  I'm paying three extra fees per month for these but people don't use them.  They don't think they are fast enough and are too fiddly to use.  I hope the 'May' update and the release of v7 makes a big impact and that it's reliable otherwise it may be time to change my plan again   

 

what is your url and what niche are you aimimg at ?

I think "niche" sites will be around for awhile.  We offer such a wonderful direct impact to those individuals who feel they belong to a unique gathering of common individuals rather than a WORLD of ANYBODYs.  But only time will tell...

I am a self hosted site and wouldn't have it any other way... Skadate Tech support is realistically unavailable for my immediate needs so it's just better for my members to deal with ME and my tech support staff.  It takes days for me to get responses from the Skadate Tech support (probably because I post these types of messages LOL) and quite honestly that makes ME and my SITE look BAD to my membership. 

I've not implemented the Chuppo on my server.  Again, the reason for this is the instability of the software and lack of response from SkaDate to find, troubleshoot and fix any problems on the SkaDate software that I would have to be a masochist to want to double that amount of frustration! 

Maybe one day in the future SkaDate will be more stable and I'll consider moving outside the comfort zone... but for now I can only go with my experience so far and that's proven to be less of a comfort zone and more of a Twilight Zone!

Well spoke oh great and wise Scallywagger! So TRUE!  And very helpful to any others who may have bought into the "SkaDate" software possibilities. 

Here's so of what I've come up with on my website: I throw approximately 20 parties a year all over the country (USA) and 1 in Canada. We call them Meet-n-Greets.  We put out a monthly newsletters, promote chat nights and randomly log on to give away FREE UPGRADES to members who have fully populated their profiles!

Unfortunately, we are in the same boat as you with our economy going down the (shit*er) and everyone is looking to save money everywhere they can... and that is very obvious with the amount of members who are not longer willing to pay for the use of the site.  We have now made the site 95% FREE.  Of course part of that may be that the site is still not fully user friendly and that's why I joined this board to help others help make it a better software.  (We gotta long way to go baby!) ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG!

Quite impressive Mr. Scallywag!  This post I'm sure will be very helpful to any customers for SkaDate. Sounds like a TON of work... If your other half is helping you then you'd better make sure Mrs. Scallywag has BIG EXPENSE account for her outfits!

Lock and Key seems to work well in the UK, and has had some interesting 'press' - as with all these things I think that choice of venue is very important. 

Couple of things
If the venue sells alcohol DO NOT pay for use of the venue - they will make a mint on the bar.
Try to influence the bar tariff in favour of your guests - if you can draw a big enough crowd you should be able to do this
Have enough people helping you, 1 drunk can spoil the whole night for everyone else
If you offer a buffet think carefully about what is on offer (the ladies love a chocolate fountain)
Dont to afraid to speak to people if you feel their behaviour is inappropriate (we  have a ZERO tolerance rule with a 6 month ban off and site and events)
Make sure you have the right mix (numbers) of members  - we are lucky as we only have couples - but big differences in age groups can also be a problem ... if you spread is too wide consider splitting the event and aim at different ages groups

I am not sure about the gender of your members ... but as a general rule of thumb the ladies are the key to successful night.

Make sure the venue is "female" friendly .. in particular the toilets/rest rooms have hand creams, nice tissues , flowers ect - they WILL remember small touches and this will influence the decision on returning to an event. 

Hope that helps !!!

Paul



 

Hi I cant say as we never been to a lock and key event - all we can say is that after 3 hours our events get very hands on - lol