It contains numerous fixes and enhancements mainly reported and suggested by our customers.

So, what’s new?

Admin Features:

- Giving new membership type when actually viewing a member detail
- “Send test email” button for mass mailing, activity scheduler
- Admin can set the priority of profile order in search results with these options: by last activity, by paid members, by photos, by join date
- Quick Search - configurable location. Zip or Country/state/city
- Send only new matches - admin can set to send only new matches for specified period
- “Select All” in admin photo approval area
- Admin gets notice if profile a member with recurring membership unregisters
- Changed the order of profiles for review in Admin Panel: latest profiles at the top
- Possibility to hide “Important Tips” on member home page via Admin Panel

User features:

- Ajax Chat/IM - overall stability, display improvement, speed, opponent connection status tracking - thanks to the new backend.
- “CHECK ALL” button to the bottom of the members emails into Mailbox
- Date of user subscription in the profiles
- Option for users to accept only matches who have profiles with pictures in them
- “My neighborhood” feature enhancement
- Tags - member can delete tags which other profiles posted on his profiles
- Possibility to upload image or insert URL for profile page background
- Readable messages change - members will be able to read and answer readable messages
- Fullsize photos
- Highlighting members on search results by membership type
- “Unsubscribe from emails” in email template
- Members can see who recently looked at their profile
- “Remember Me” option at sign-in
- “Subscription” page redesign
- Fixed basic components on “Build Profile” page
- If a free member can’t use IM, they still can answer IM initiated by a premium member
- Text box to add personal message on the “Invite a friend” feature
- Friends request redesign
- Captcha image on contact form

System changes

Fixes

- If someone is removed that a member has referred that they still have that number of referrals
- Ajax chat window jump
- Featured Profiles “Next” link on home page - Skips the first full page of featured members
- Not sending matches email if no matches
- Moderators review profile photos in Admin Panel
- Language Management: `Language Key Types` alphabetical sorting.
- Suspended photos appeared while browsing randomly (fixed).
- Photo Rating module APP many fixes and improvements

The new update is now ready for shipping. Check out SkaDate demo.

Thus we are awaiting the stable update release to be available for everyone by the end of this week. It includes some of the very important enhancements requested by customers in our public forum.

This is the latest update of SkaDate 6 Unity before the upcoming major release.

Software solution EULA:
3.4 Customer’s rights to modify software source code.

Managed and Software solution EULA:
8. How we use information about you.

These additions reflect common sense and are usually figured out on skadate.com website materials and via communication with customers. Thanks to one of our prospects, they are now in the EULA as well, effective from this moment.

The new copies of EULA can be found at their regular place:
http://www.skadate.com/eula-managed.pdf
http://www.skadate.com/eula-software.pdf

Promoting dating site is not an easy task; it requires a lot of time, effort and dedication. Some people say that internet marketing is not all that difficult as soon as you become aware of the most popular techniques that can be applied and how well you use them will dictate the level of your success. Let’s say you have already launched a new dating site. On this step, your site is just a nice picture on the screen and no more, nobody knows it, nobody ever heard of it. You are about to start one of the most indispensable thing: you’ve gotta bring people to your site and make them come back again and again.

At the very beginning, you need to decide who your target audience is. Believe me, this is a crucial moment, all your future actions in site promotion will be based on this thing. It is not the best idea to create just a generic dating site since too many exist already; it is much more effective concentrate promotion among specific group of people, let’s say rock music lovers. Makes sense? You may take into consideration geographical location where you are going to launch your site. It is more reasonable to target the audience from one specific place, start from one city rather then from the whole world. After becoming popular in one city you may move from one to another.

Next thing: we would strongly suggest you to register on famous dating sites to compare them with the one you have. You may get ideas in forums while participating in different discussion boards. Using these resources try to figure out what people expect from a modern dating site? All the information will give you tons of insight and may very well change your business plan.
Writing is one of the keys for success. Submit press releases and different articles about your new site to special directories, social networking, and blogs. This is called “article marketing”. You can create your own blog, too, and write about your products, become an expert in some topic, people will trust you and read your posts, then add the link to your site in all places you participate and to all emails you are sending. In addition, you can use YouTube site for submitting video about your site and services.

Many other techniques can be applied. Educate yourself on Search Engine Optimization; good news is much information can be found on the Internet. Learn about pay-per-click ads and Google Advertising Programs, search for more products specially created for web site marketing.
So, let’s conclude everything that we covered :

1) Decide who your target audience is.
2) Make comparative analysis: visit famous dating sites, see what they offer, come up with new ideas on the base of what you’ve learned.
3) Participate in different dating forums, communicate with people who date online.
4) Article marketing: press releases, articles, blog posts. Write about your services. Add links to your site in your posts and signatures.
6) Educate yourself in search engine optimization. Learn more about web site marketing products.

You are always welcome to share your thoughts about everything that was written here. Feel free to leave your comments about how you use any of the above techniques.We will supplement this blog with more materials about online marketing as time goes.

First of all, we are receiving a lot of useful feedback from our customers on the public SkaDate forum. Especially interesting is the feature suggestion section where our customers let us know what they want to see in SkaDate. If you don’t participate yet, there’s a heap of reasons why you should.

This update is going to be all about feature enhancements and we believe it’s going to make life much easier for all our customers and their users.

A list of confirmed changes for the upcoming update is also available. You should hurry to check it out because there’s still some time left to submit what you find necessary.

Our development dept is humming and romping.

You can place this widget anywhere on your site, for example on index page. You can set your own custom widget size to make it fit your page layout. This can be a great little tool to engage your customers in your site activity.

An improtant notice to SkaDate users: chuPPito will be integrated with the next SkaDate update but you can have it in advance. All others chuPPo Chat users, feel free to make inquiries for chuPPito installation assistance.

This particular chuPPito object is connected to chuPPo webcam chat software demo by simply indicating its URL in connection parameters. Feel free to look at this post page source to find out how to install it yourself. We’ll follow up with more detailed installation instructions on chuPPo.com.

Thank you.

We welcome anyone with a fresh SkaDate installation to take part in this action. In best scenario this can bring incredible value for webmasters and a vast source of information for us to see how we can make your life easier.

We are sure there is a lot to share. Things like our recent discussion of membership models are only a top of an iceberg. Promotion, spam issues, interaction stimulation, keeping members active, anyone?

Now, feel free to participate!

It’s that time of the product life-cycle again. We are planning next major upgrade for SkaDate, version 7. We are at the stage of gathering all the feedback and putting on paper what should be implemented.

We target the following 3 objectives with SkaDate 7:

1) Several major new features (groups, classifieds, etc.)
2) A lot of enhancements and optimization of the existing features. This is the neverending mission across the product existence history.
3) Performance optimization. We made some custom performance tuning for several big customers. Some of that can be implemented in the main product.

And of course, SkaDate 7 is not going to be a great thing without your suggestions. We found great value of communicating with customers, so new SkaDate can’t go without your contribution.

chuPPo

chuPPo applications do not have any versioning because of the hosted model and constant incremental development. You do not need to download anything, you just see your chat, IM, and recorder getting better, often on a daily basis.

Currently we are eager to hear from our audience what chuPPo can do for you.

Skalfa Boards

Now, for some action go to the new Skalfa Boards and let us know how we can make running your business easier. From now on this is the right place to give us some insight on improving our products.

David Evans, online dating blogger has got some difficult questions for vendors about the status of software market for online dating and social networking sites on his resource Online Dating Insider.

I felt urge to answer because those questions really represent what people want to know about our product. I’m also giving some insight about fundamental problems and how we solve them.