Cooking dating site in 66.5 Hours
U.S. residents spent $469.5 million on online dating and personals in 2004, the largest segment of “paid content†on the web, according to a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and comScore Networks.
Such services generally allow people to provide personal information, then search for other individuals using criteria such as age range, gender and location. Most sites allow members to upload photos of themselves and browse the photos of others. Sites may offer additional services, such as webcasts, online chat, and message boards. Sites sometimes allow people to register for free but may offer services which require a monthly fee.
Many sites are broad-based, with members from a variety of backgrounds looking for different types of relationships. Other sites are more specific, based on the type of members, interests, location, or relationship desired.
Nowadays when dating sites topic seems to be overdiscussed among webmasters, some developers still have something to startup:
I’m single and after trying the online dating thing I quickly ascertained two things:
- The paid online dating market is very saturated
- The free online dating market is also saturated but with sites that are clunky, difficult to use, so littered with ads they’re nearly unusable, and bombarded with useless features
I saw an opening and I took it: I knew I could build something better in a very short period of time with almost no overhead. The beauty of this is that if this site isn’t successful there’s no layoffs, burned VC funding, and I’m ultimately not contributing to another dot-com crash. All I’ve lost is 66.5 hours and a couple bags of coffee beans, I’ll just go back to my day job.Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks such as CakePHP: I built a full-featured dating website, from concept to launch, in 66.5 hours. In a typical 9-5 job this would amount to about a week and a half.
Continue to The True Single Geek Made Dating Site Story