Information and news about SkaDate community site software.
Project website: SkaDate.com
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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’
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.
Triple color scheme – is built on using colors equally standing out from each other in the chromatic circle (such as red, yellow and blue).
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
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating software · SkaDate · social network template
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
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!
Posted in News, Products, SkaDate | Tags: conference · iDate
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Although 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 
number 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).
This 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.
Representing 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 
already 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.
Logically, 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
Posted in Miscellaneous, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating · dating software · payment method · SkaDate · SMS billing · software
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
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 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 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!
Advertise, 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 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.
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
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: ad · attract · dating · potential · profit · software
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Number of members photos.
This improvement helps your members to see how many photos a member has without looking at her profile.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating software · dating templates · online dating · SkaDate
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
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.
Posted in News, Products, SkaDate |
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
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.
Posted in Products, SkaDate | Tags: stratups
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
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.
Posted in News, SkaDate | Tags: special offer
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Hi all. I’m glad to announce that we kept our promise by opening SkaDate marketplace with certified web developers’ where you may order modifications, design, add-ons for SkaDate 7 dating software from SkaDate certified experts. All web developers and designers are recognized as qualified specialists in web development. SkaDate Certified Specialist resource recognizes web developers who have met necessary standards of experience and knowledge requirements in one or more SkaDate development areas and have maintained standards of professional practice. The right combination of their education and experience accentuate the level of the qualification and provides you with the opportunity to distinguish and choose the right web developer for your project.
SkaDate customers may find a right web developer, negotiate an affordable price for a modification, control the process of the modification development and work directly with the web developer.
SkaDate Certified Specialists may advertise as certified specialists only if they are certified directly by SkaDate. SkaDate company is not responsible for any modifications made by web developers and the process of negotiations between customers and web developers, prices and any other issues concerned this web developers’ resource.
The list of SkaDate certified specialists and current offers are available at www.SkaDateCS.com
Feel free to join www.SkaDateCS.com and find the right web developer for your web site.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
If you have any questions or thoughts please leave your comment or if you think that this information will be useful for someone please share it. Thank you in advance.
Regards, Tim.
Posted in News, SkaDate | Tags: certified web developers' · dating software · SkaDate · SkaDate Certified Specialists · SkaDate marketplace
Friday, March 6th, 2009
Today I am going to cover two major things we have for you. The first thing is about the new build of SkaDate dating software and community script – SkaDate 7.1081. This build contains new features, improvements and minor fixes. SkaDate 7 developers prepared the following interesting features for SkaDate license owners:
XML Sitemap automatic generator. Now SkaDate 7 dating software will be more search engine friendly due to the XML sitemap which will be automatically generated each time users create profiles, forum topics, blogs, photos and etc. You just need to submit your SkaDate web site’s XML site map to Google via Webmasters tools (Google webmasters). This XML Sitemap will help Google, Yahoo and other search engines to crawl and index your web site consequently you get more positions in search results. Read more about XML Sitemaps.
SMS billing. SkaDate 7 dating software and community script now has sms billing. This is a long-awaited feature. SkaDate 7 supports the following SMS billing payment providers: DaoPay.com and Zong.com You get an account at one of the mentioned sms billing payment providers and your members can pay for these services: Hot List (profiles at the sidebar) and 24 hours trial membership. We think to develop other services for sms billing but a bit later. This feature will help you to increase your revenue through getting real-time payments for your web site’s services from your members. A number of customers prefer to pay for online services by sms and not to share their credit card information. You may reach additional number of customers from your target audience. Try out SkaDate 7 dating software Demo
Profile view customization feature has been improved. Now you may easily change the color of your profile background or customize the background with a picture.
Classifieds are now available in SkaDate 7. Your members can easily advertise their services, sell things, post jobs in the section for classifieds. Other members can add bids and add comments to posted classifieds. It’s a useful feature to interest your members and involve them into social networking and even help them to earn money while being your web site’s members. You will find Classifieds at SkaDate 7 Demo http://www.skadate.com/demo/classifieds.php
Mail system and Cron improvement. We changed the priority of mailing letters to users in SkaDate 7. Now welcome and verification letters will be sent at high priority. As for mass mailing and activity scheduler letters they will be sending every 30 minutes.
3 new cool templates are available in this build plus we adjusted old templates to IE-7. Check them here.
Second thing is about the changes in pricing for SkaDate additional licenses, prices for design integration and designing a unique template.
Design integration price has been reduced from $1000 to $400. Designing a unique template price has been also reduced from $3000 to $1000. We reduced the prices due to the simplicity of the new way of template integration introduced in this SkaDate update. You can have a unique design from SkaDate designers or integrate your design – now it’s even more affordable!
Discounts for SkaDate 7 dating software packages. Now if you buy additional license of SkaDate 7 dating software solution or managed solution you get discounts. Here are the discounted prices for additional SkaDate dating software packages:
| SkaDate Software Solution |
SkaDate Managed Solution |
1st license – $795
2nd license – $695
3rd license – $595 |
1st license – $395
2nd license – $295
3rd license – $195 |
I guess it’s enough for now. Our technical team works hard and in the next build will be available one more important feature for social networking and dating web sites – groups. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to leave your comments.
Thank you for your attention and consideration.
Regards, Tim.
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, SkaDate | Tags: dating software · design integration · discounts · new build · release · SkaDate · SMS billing · unique design · XML sitemap
