Choosing the right dating site

Choosing your perfect dating site is not entirely unlike searching for Mr or Miss right. Your chosen dating site will be a valued partner in your search for love and depending on how successful you are, you may be together a while. This is why it's important to choose a reliable site that will help, rather than hinder your search.

When choosing a dating site, you need to first start by thinking about what your requirements are – what you are looking to get from your online dating experience. It could be that you are looking for a serious relationship or marriage, or you could be looking for casual dating or even sex. Are you looking for people of a certain religion or race? Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jewish, Asian or Black – there are dating sites out there that cater for all of these and more. Is this important enough for you to want to date on a site dedicated solely to people who fit the bill?

Are you gay, straight or bi? Many dating sites are designed to only enable straight or gay dating, usually for technical reasons, while other sites cater only to straight daters for religious reasons.

Do you want to spend a lot of time online interacting with people before meeting up or are you keen to take things off the site quickly? This could influence the choice of features you might want to see on a site – sometimes simple email-like messaging will be enough, or you might want video / voice chat, instant messaging or even dating by mobile / cellular phone as part of the deal.

Are you happier searching for your own matches or would you like the site to help by delivering matches to you based on a psychological assessment, compatibility testing or even astrological matching? Would you like to be able to search by people's interests, rather than simply statistics?

All these questions will factor into your decision and so it's best to have at least a general idea about what you want before beginning your search, though looking at a few sites could give you a better understanding of what features are available.

Once you have an idea, you can start looking around. If you're new to online dating, it's generally best to have a quick lookat as many sites you can find, to see the differences between them and learn about what's around. Alternatively, if you want to save time, you can use the free quiz on this site instead, where you can narrow down your list to onlu those sites that are likely to be suitable for you. Once you've done that, sign up for free accounts on at least 3 sites and try out the free searches to see the type of people who date there and whether they look like people you would normally find acceptable as potential matches. If a site looks about right, subscribe and pay, but it's worth keeping a well-written profile on the others in case someone you are interested in turns up.

For more online dating advice, visit my other website – Everyone's Guide to Online Dating .