- Basic
membership is Free.
- Premium membership available called the Gold package:
- 3 months: $26.97
($8.99 per month)
- 6
months: $41.94 ($6.99 per month)
- 12 months: $71.88 ($5.99 per
month)
- Regular (free) members
have these
features available to them:
- Create your
profile and post up to15 photos
- Perform searches
for suitable members near your locale.
- Browse members' profiles and
see their pictures
- Send and receive e-mails
- Set e-mail filters
- Send "winks"
- Forums available to comment in
- Blogs are posted regularly or you can host your
own
- Gold
package members have all of the above features plus the following additions:
- no
site advertisements
- see who has viewed your profile
- highlighted
profile
- priority placement in searches (ahead of
regular
members)
- private photos album (of other members)
- post
pictures and graphics in comments, forums, and blogs
- A
full search facility is available, allowing members to search by:
- type of relationship
- hair color
- body
type
- education
level
- language
- living
arrangement
- children (preference)
- occupation
- distance
from your locale
(in miles)
- income level
- gender
- age range
- marital status
- activity preferences
- whether
the member has pictures posted
- ethnicity
- personal
qualities
- smoking
- drinking
- height
- weight
Match Doctor is a
different kind of dating site. They are a hybrid site that
offers
many of the features of a social networking site along with the dating
service. Their membership seems very young (typical of social
networks), with most participants being under the age of 25.
They
feature dating that's "100% free", while they also offer
their
premium upgrade called the Gold Package.
While the idea of a multi-purpose site
may make sense
in a business plan (with possibilities of overlapping interests, lots
of activity and the possibility of "selling something" to members) the reality
is somewhat different. At present, the purposes for being on a
social networking site diverge with those of a dating site.
At present, the perceived overlap is not actually very large.
With the advent of "Web 2.0" we find that
people tend to go to websites to
do something specific, that they had in mind before they got in front of
their screen (even if that something is to just goof around with other
14 year olds). The outdated concept of people going on the
net
and wandering around before finding something of interest ended when
Yahoo and Google revolutionized our search capabilities.
In trying MatchDoctor search
engine we get a result of 23 members within 50 miles of our search
locale. Of these, 9 have been on the site within the past week. After the top
ten, the rest haven't been on the site for 3 months or longer.
That's a
red flag for an inactive site. Those of you who know what a
waste
of time an inactive site is will probably not bother reading the rest of this review and simply check out another
dating site What remains to be said
is
intended for those who are new to dating websites or new to inactive sites.
The most important aspect of any site is
the size
and concentration of membership. The biggest site in the
world,
Match.com
for example has more than 25 million members. They are an
international site with members all over the world. The other major sites'
memberships are in the 10-15 million range. Those sites
offer
choices within the membership for finding a good number of possible
compatible partners. The concentration of members factor
is
important when you have a site of 1-2 million but it is focused in
a relatively small geographical zone. For example, there are sites in our UK dating sites category with memberships well below the sites we review in this (international) Mainstream Online Dating category, but
because
the former are focused mainly in the UK they have a high concentration
of
members in one geographical area, making them an effective site to join, if you live in the UK. Sp you have to look at both size and concentration of membership when deciding which site is going to be more fruitful.
Another
factor we consider of high importance is the activity levels and member
involvement at the sites we review. Even a site
with
a huge membership can get stale when the members themselves aren't
on-site or are only on-site briefly to check their inboxes. We
look
for the last active or last logged-in information to determine
to how active a site is. The search we mentioned above is an
example of the last actives having been too long (a month is
much too long).
The ability of free
members to e-mail other members is a big point with us too. If you are a free member of a site with an active membership and lots of possibilities then you have a decision to make: do you
pony
up for a Premium membership because you think you may have found some
good prospects or do you sit back and wait for one of them to
make a move on you. This indecision is never a good thing. So we were pleased to see that MatchDoctor lets free members send and receive emails.
The other thing we like
to see at a good site is access
to photos (and enlargements of them) and the availability of partial
member profiles for free members. Most
sites get this
facet right about half the time. This site did a great job on
profiles
and gave us access to photos, but no enlargements.
How
do we
regard a site that has an inactive membership? We consider
them a
risky situation at best for trying to find a good
relationship.
With sites like MatchDoctor.com
you absolutely have to be sure that you
aren't wasting your time or money trying to find a good match or two.
The practical options available to you are joining as a free
member to learn the site's good and bad points by
experience.
The other route is to bypass sites like these and just put your time
into a better one like one from our top ten rankings or another site
from our reviews that seems to be a good fit for you.
To
discover which dating site is best for you, try reading
some more of our reviews and then join a few dating sites to see for yourself how they
suit you. There are no limits to how many free sites you
can join, except for the practical ones you impose on
yourself,
like how much time are you going to devote to searching, communicating and following up on leads that will come into your
computer's e-mail inbox. We recommend signing up for free trials with at least two dating sites, in order to see how they compare.
Click on the button below to check out MatchDoctor.com for yourself...
