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Site Templates: Colors of Success

July 1, 2009 – 5:48 am, by Irene @ Skalfa

Conducting an online business on the web, you get to understand that the main impression you make on your target audience is visual impression. ‘Clothes count…’ – this old saying is more than true when it comes to attracting potential members to a dating site or a social network. So choosing the right template is almost as important as choosing the domain name, which is going to be your website’s ‘trademark’. It will help to create a certain mood to your members – either cheerful and ready-to-make-friends or sensual and appealing – depending on the site conception. A carefully chosen social network template can make an occasional site visitor feel interest and finally stay a part of your online community for long. While a poor and tacky-colored design will definitely ‘help’ you lose a potential member in a flicker. And that’s the reason why a whole division in marketing studies the influence of various color combinations to consumers’ activity. Below you will find a few examples of what emotions people associate with different colors, and how you can use this psychological tool depending on the goals you want to achieve.

Black – is a very strong color. It is a color of authority, stability and power. It is also associated with elegance and luxurious classics. It makes other colors look ’sharer’ and helps to create an atmosphere of mystery. Since it evokes strong emotions, too much of black may be overwhelming for your site members, so try to dilute it by adding more bright colors.

Dating Shine

White – is associated with innocence, purity and simplicity. It has a calming and stabilizing influence. It does not irritate the eye and allows for a relatively large number of colorful components (if chosen as a template background).

A Book of Faces

Red – is a color of love, passion, excitement, aggression and energy. It’s the color stimulating all kinds of appetites. So it’s an indispensable color for those creating adult websites.

Blue – is likely the world’s favorite color. It is associated with calmness and trustworthiness. The darker shades of blue are ideal for businesses, as they symbolize financial stability, professionalism and loyalty. White-and-blue templates are ideal for business networks. Light blue colors give a feeling of freshness and cleanliness and get you in the careless mood.

Business Networking

Yellow – implies laughter, sunshine, happiness and amusement. Yellow color helps our brain release more serotonin, which makes us feel cheerful and energetic. Using this color in the right place and amount can become a powerful tool for involving new members into your social network.

Victory

Green – is known to be a relaxing color associated with nature, money and health. It is pleasant for the senses and has a calming effect.

Orange – color is tied with fun, pleasure, energy, warmth. An interesting thing is that it can make expensive products seem more affordable. This color is sharp and vibrant and implies anything but calmness.

Golden – is considered to be a color symbolizing wealth. Having a few golden components in your design will give it a classy look drawing attention.

Sparkles

Grey – is associated with solid and practical things. Silver color (a hue of grey) represents high tech. Too much of grey in design will most likely leave a dull impression. But adding just a few grey components will give that necessary rock solidity to your website (especially if that is a business network).

When choosing a design for your site, give strong attention to the color combination, which should be harmonious and selected in accordance with chromatic color scheme principles.

Take a look at one of the examples of a ‘color wheel’

thumbnail

So, here are some basics on color combination, which will hopefully guide you in the right direction:

Monochromatic color scheme – is based on combining different shades of one color segment (for example, darker and lighter shades of blue). Such design gives a site a pleasant, clean and integral look.

Complimentary color scheme – is using contrast colors, which are opposite to each other on the ‘color wheel’. Such warm-and-cold combination will look fresh and lively. One of the best examples of such scheme is combining light green and pink.

Color Rings

Triple color scheme – is built on using colors equally standing out from each other in the chromatic circle (such as red, yellow and blue).

Color Touch II

Analogue color scheme – uses three color segments neighboring each other in the color circle.  Such design will be colorful and harmonious.

Also, don’t forget about your target audience ethnic habits. For example, Asian people prefer red color, while the Dutch incline to orange.

SkaDate community script offers a wide range of site templates to meet your taste and needs. But we also thought of our customers who want to be different from others. SkaDate dating software designers will be happy to assist you in giving your site a unique look either by developing a custom template or by integrating your own design into the script.

Remember that people do judge by the cover. So, give it a strong attention as this is one more step to the top of success.

As usual, you are welcome to leave your comments. I will be glad to read them.

Best wishes,

Irene



SkaDate coming to iDate 2009 LA event

June 22, 2009 – 3:08 am, by Emil @ Skalfa

June 25, 26 are the dates when the upcoming iDate event will be held in SLS Hotel, Los Angeles, CA.

We are coming there to meet new prospects, answer questions, and to discuss co-operations with providers of value-added services. Also we plan to meet some of our customers. If you plan to visit iDate and have some questions about our products and services feel free to ask our representatives. We will be happy to chat with you, answer questions, and advise about possible solutions for your project.

Come join us at iDate!



SMS-billing: the new age payment system

June 18, 2009 – 11:43 am, by Irene @ Skalfa

smsAlthough introduced not so long ago, the sms-billing service has been coming to the fore among the well-known and trustworthy payment methods. What is the reason for its growing popularity?

It’s pretty easy to explain by turning to any customer’s psychology: they want to get goods and services quickly, safely and not having to go through a 42-15617533number of sophisticated steps. SMS-billing meets all these requirements providing security along with mobility. No need to expose the credit card details, no need to wait for the transaction to be completed – with sms-payment you get what you want instantly, no need to think about cash – short messages are relatively cheap, and you take these expenses as a part of your monthly telephone bill (which is also an important psychological aspect).

servicesThis payment method is convenient and beneficial not only for consumers (site members in our case), but also for vendors. First of all, if you are on the second team, it gives you an opportunity to make the subscription for your site easier and more affordable. Imagine the situation with a Free member, who receives an offer from another user to chat tête-a-tête, but his membership does not include the private messaging service. Most people being in his shoes would prefer paying only for this particular feature (by pressing a few buttons on their mobile device and getting instant access to the desired service) as opposed to purchasing the monthly membership through one of the online payment providers, which would take more time, trouble and funds. Well, I would… as well as the major part of the European countries’ population. It does not mean that sms-payments have to be a substitute for your traditional membership plans, but they can be a great add-on to the process of monetizing your online dating business. A simple calculation shows that depending on the number of your site members and the fee you set up for the site services, you could get hundreds to thousands dollars daily on top of income from subscriptions.

secure_100by100_symbolRepresenting a well-known software company – which is SkaDate – I can’t help saying a few words about how we follow the sms-boom tendency developing new features for our community script and dating software. SkaDate 7 dating software programmers introduced a number of new useful features for members, including the sms-billing. For now it does not cover a wide range of site services: only ‘hot list’ and ‘24-hour trial membership’. We are studying the response of our audience (since our product is mostly USA-oriented) in order to decide if we should go ahead with expanding this feature. But in case you decide to be on the pacesetters team offering the sms-billing service on their sites to show all its advantages to the members, SkaDate team will gladly help you with this. There are 2 world-famous sms-payment providers already integrated into our script: DaoPay and Zong. So to customize the software for adding more items into the list of site features paid by sms will be a lot easier (since the sms billing system itself is mobile_girlsalready present in the program). You could modify the script by yourself (if you have enough coding knowledge), or leave that to our high-skilled developers team. Another option is visiting the SkaDate Certified Specialists website – the guys who know the product really well and provide high quality assistance on any script modifications.

mobile_phoneLogically, we have come up to the moment, where I should start speaking about the disadvantages of using sms-billing for your online venture. One is that this payment method is yet to strike root in the USA, where people still prefer tried-and-true PayPal, CCBill and Authorize.net… And for now I can’t think of any more cons, so if you have thoughts on this aspect – you are most welcome to share them by leaving the post comments.

I am looking forward to reading your responses!

Best wishes,
Irene



WackWall feature update: member/content management tools

June 17, 2009 – 2:37 am, by Emil @ Skalfa

Hey, today we have some more news than just fabulous we-are-working-on-WackWall-2.0 one. We have successfully finished deploying new set of management features for the current WackWall platform.

From now on Network Admnistrators can:

- Remove your social network from WackWall;
- Remove all kinds of content from your social network;
- Remove comments from all kinds of content on your social network;
- Ban users.

These features were long due and we took our time to release them now instead of further forcing to wait for them in the upcoming grand re-launch.

Feel free to submit feedback at dev.wackwall.com.



How to make your website a profitable venture

June 2, 2009 – 7:19 am, by Irene @ Skalfa

Dating industry is no longer a newborn in the world of business. It has been developing for years and has obviously reached the level where we can speak about serious competition and enormous profits. So, the major question keeping the dating sites’ owners up at nights is how to fight the competition and gain profit at reasonable expenses and within a relatively short time interval.

Now that there is a number of advanced features supported by dating software (that only keep improving), a dating site owner has multiple tools for achieving the main goal of every businessman – financial benefit from strategical efforts.

Below you will find some useful tips that will guide you on how you can get your site prospering and beneficial thanks to the SkaDate software features and your will to succeed.

be-attractiveBe attractive for potential members!! Sounds pretty banal…. It is quite a logical assumption that a ‘busy’ site is a synonym to success. The more members surf through your site – the more traffic they generate, thus making the site very attractive for advertisers. Not to mention the direct flow of funds from your site members who pay for subscriptions. And behind all that stands a carefully chosen site concept that will allow you to find your niche in the competitive world of dating industry. How does SkaDate help? Well, in many ways.

Firstly, bright colors as well as stylish and functional design will make your site look professional and attractive. With an opportunity to add eye-catching videos and photos to the index page, the right template will become the first (and very important) step in involving the potential member into your website community.

Another important advantage of our script is its customizability. It is developed in a way that allows you to advance it up to the level of your dream. All you need is coding skills (or the right person who has ones) and your imagination. Our professional developers team is always there to assist in case you want to be 100% confident about the positive result. But for basic site customization (say, changing the profile field names and text areas content, adding or removing menu items) you do not need coding knowledge at all – you have the Admin Panel interface (which is very user-friendly) for this kind of adjustments.

As you can see, SkaDate offers a range of tools for making your website unique and attractive in appearance and interface, but this is just the beginning…

divide-and-rule2‘Divide and rule’ What would that mean in terms of running a dating site? Right now we are speaking about the policy of managing the membership types intended to motivate your site members for subscribing to paid plans – thus, to increasing your funds. The membership types system in SkaDate software is perfectly optimized for you to ‘play’ with site services by making some (or even all) of them available only to a certain membership. This will inspire Free members to go for subscription in order to be able to experience the full range of helpful and entertaining site features – you just need to make it something very hard to refuse from!

advertiseAdvertise, Advertise and… Advertise!!! An essential part of your ‘profit-aimed’ strategy is advertising, so we have come up to the most important component of your success-building. Let’s say, your site conception does not stipulate a paid membership system, at least at the beginning when you need to get your site live and full of members. Does that mean that you will have to operate at a loss? Not at all. The Google Almighty is there to help. It offers you a tool to make your site a profitable business. That is Google AdSense. All you need to do is place the text, image or video advertisement administered by Google onto your website and get paid on a per-click or per-impression basis. Yes, it is that simple!

SkaDate did its best to simplify the process of turning views and clicks into your financial income. It has become so easy to add links and banners to your site that even a child could do that. You just need to embed the banner code via Admin Panel, choose the place on your site where the ad will be displayed… and start earning!

time-to-succedTime to succeed! Now that you have chosen a path of online dating industry to follow, you will see how interesting, exciting, partly complicated, but satisfying this venture can be. The main advice is ‘test and analyze’. Don’t be afraid to play with the software opportunities and ways to attract potential members. Carefully study the response to each step of your marketing strategy, make conclusions, try new advertising moves and be confident about the result.

We are not trying to assure you that conducting online dating business is easy. It will require much of your time, efforts and knowledge. It might be also risky. And you will need a well-built strategy for developing your website. And even then no one can guarantee that your site will get in a row with Match.com and eHarmony.com. But there is a number of success stories in dating industry proving that a small business can grow into a multimillion turnover venture, and why not try to add your own story into that list?

Note that according to the results of the latest economic surveys, even under the crisis unfavorable conditions the online dating industry only goes forward at a steady gait. People really prefer to get over the ills of life and fight against depressive mood next to someone ‘near and dear’. And what could be a better place for finding a soul mate than a dating website or a social network where anyone can forget about his problems? Here is the graph illustrating the trend.

unique-users1

I will be glad to read your comments and viewpoints on this tendency as well as thoughts and anticipation about the future of online dating industry.

Best wishes,
Irene



Why Buddypress is not going to cut it

May 23, 2009 – 5:55 am, by Emil @ Skalfa

Buddypress is an interesting open source community platform project. It got some traction and there a lot of users who like Buddypress more than any other alternatives on the table.

On the other hand I think it’s a seriously misled effort.

First of all, it’s based on Wordpress MU and here I smell the biggest trouble in the air. Andy Peatling is putting a lot of work to base social network features on top of the stagnant and underdeveloped Wordpress MU (looks like only Donncha works on it?) which is a complex platform unintended for what Buddypress developers do with it. Buddypress is essentially hacking Wordpress MU into something it doesn’t want to do and it takes to be a good hacker to do that.

The second suspicious thing is the decisions Andy makes to just keep it going. Read the first two paragraphs about complexity of Wordpress and decision to have logic functions in themes and your nose will feel the same as mine.

The third thing is that Wordpress MU already brings a lot to the table but there’s no guarantee you’ll need it that way. You think the 2 user consoles (one from Wordpress, and one from Buddypress) above the site content are any good? Is this a compromise you agree to make for the sake of using Wordpress plugins?

During my career I’ve been involved in a couple of projects that were started the same wrong way. You take some framework or existing project to “save time on developing trivial features”. You have some head start and agree with limitations it trades for. Inevitably you grow unhappy with those limitations because of the nature of complex systems. If you play it nice with the platform – I mean doing things the way it wants – it’s fine. But the more business logic you need the more clinical situations you face. The system tells you “It can’t be done your way – live with it”.

In the end of the day you might spend more time to get things stretched to work than to write everything from scratch. Also imagine results of both approaches. I’ve seen so much evidence that the don’t-write-what-somebody-else-wrote-100-times notion is as wrong as people-want-features one.

It makes perfect sense for Matt to have Buddypress in Automattic portfolio and it takes only one blog post to have Buddypress jump into the eyes of tens of millions bloggers of the world. But what’s the point? Is it to create a cool open source social platform or to show it can be done on Wordpress MU?

All in all Andy is showing a great deal of coolness in Buddypress user interfaces but I think he would better use his talent for a less troubled start (cough join OpenWack? cough). Buddypress devs will need so much extra guts to fight through Wordpress MU.

I may have done a poor homework of studying Buddypress and will appreciate if anybody clues me in in comments. But feedback like “The big drawback that I see right now is that the blog interface is pretty complex for a novice. I’ve been using Drupal for several years, and one of the things I like about it is that students don’t need any training in how to write a post on the course site. I can imagine them being overwhelmed by the wp dashboard, categories, tags, and the like.” already indicate you’re in trouble. Let along long term compatibility issues threats of two separate developments.

Anyone throw in tips of using Buddypress efficiently I’d love your input.



New dating software build – SkaDate 7.1201 is available.

April 29, 2009 – 3:50 am, by Tim @ Skalfa

SkaDate released a new dating software build – SkaDate 7.1201. The main features delivered in the SkaDate 7.1201 build are:
-Top rated blog lists
-Polls
-French and Italian languages
-Three new community and dating templates
-Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool
-IM/Chat Smiles;
-FavIcon
-Members’ photo count;
-Paging for Friend Lists;
- Apply photo watermark to all photos
-Admin photo upload tool
-My Saved Searches
- Latest Activity
- Status Line

Three new well designed templates: Color Touch II, Emotion and Dating Shine.
SkaDate presents three new templates for dating sites and social networks. Starting or running a social network and a dating web site seems to be a daunting task, but with the new great looking templates you may attract more members who will love your web site. SkaDate web designers sharpen their skills on continuing basis and gladden us with their artworks. Take a look at the templates:

Dating Template - Color Touch II Dating Shine - dating template Usual date

Polls
Here are screen shots of the admin and user interfaces of the Pools feature. You may easily create a new poll and set particular answers to your questions. This feature is useful for collecting your members’ feedback which can be used for the analysis of their needs and desires.

polls_admin polls

Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool.
Sometimes it is necessary to check your members’ background images to prevent using copyrighted materials. Here are screen shots of the admin interface of this feature:

background_approval_admin background_approval_admin1

IM/Chat Smiles
Smiles is a common feature of a number instant messengers and chats on the net and now you may express your emotions by using smiles in SkaDate dating software chat and IM.

chat_smiles

FavIcon
You may upload your favorite icon and your members will see it in a browser. SkaDate.com has its own favicon. Favicon maybe your logotype or any other picture you want to show in front of your web address.
favicon

Number of members photos.
This improvement helps your members to see how many photos a member has without looking at her profile.

number_of_photos

Admin photo upload tool.
This feature was in SkaDate 6 and we recoded it for SkaDate 7 basing on customers’ feedback. Now administrators may upload photos to a member’s profile.

photo_upload_by_admin

My Saved Searches
We made it easier for your members to save their searches. If your member finds a number of interesting profiles he may save the search and it will be available at his fingertips – Member Home page. He can look the profiles again and initiate contact with members at your dating web site or social network.

my_saved_search

Latest activity.
Well this feature was long awaited by our customers and we developed it for them. I guess you know this feature from the famous FaceBook™ where you can see the activity of your friends and your activity will be shown to your friends as well. This status section displays the latest activity of your friends, take a look at the below screen shot.

latest_activity1

Status line.
This feature is also cool and you can type anything you have in your mind thereby express your mood. Your updates will be shown in the latest activity at your friends’ member home pages. In my mind the status line feature is a perfect feature that will appeal to a set of users.
status_line1

The build also includes several dating software enhancements and minor fixes. As always SkaDate professionally trained web developers made a good job and developed a number of useful features for online dating web sites and social networks. Feel free to check SkaDate 7 Demo.
SkaDate 7.1201 is a free build to SkaDate 7 license owners and is available for use.

What are your thoughts on the 7.1201 build, and which features are you most interested in using? Please share your opinion.



Recommended SkaDate Hosting

April 8, 2009 – 2:44 am, by Emil @ Skalfa

There IS life after purchase. We have always been eager to help out our customers with running their sites in a smooth way.

One of the value-added services that we are happy to offer is our own shared and dedicated SkaDate hosting offerings. However if you choose to host your site elsewhere now we are also able to help.

There are decent hosting companies that proved to provide smooth SkaDate hosting experience, and now we are happy to recommend them.

Look at http://www.skadate.com/hosting.php

This list debuts with only one company so far, TigerSites. If you have recommendations from your own experience feel free to make a tip. We will maintain this list to provide valid recommendations at any given moment.



Are you smart enough to serve Joe the Dater?

April 8, 2009 – 2:28 am, by Emil @ Skalfa

David Evans at Online Dating Insider kindly offered me an opportunity to talk to his audience and this resulted in my guest post at his resource. I talk about the problems that a lot of online dating startups.

Read the full version of my post “Are you smart enough to server Joe the Dater?” on Online Dating Insider.



Hurry: SkaDate software license FREE!

April 1, 2009 – 1:04 am, by Emil @ Skalfa

I’m glad to announce that we are bringing in structural changes to the company that allow us to give away free licenses to SkaDate software and to waive support fees.

From now on you can download the latest version of SkaDate software from SkaDate customer area and receive unlimited email support from our team. If you feel like calling us it’s ok, too – 24/7 team is also in its place.


Allright silly heads, let the April fools jokes begin with this one.





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