We've got one of our datingsites.org.uk guys to poke around at the dating direct dating website to show to
what you can expect when you first sign up at datingdirect.co.uk - this is a 100% completely free to sign up
and use dating website which has hundreds of thousands of men and women looking for a relationship. Here's their review of dating direct:
At first glance www.datingdirect.co.uk is really for anyone. Most people think that dating sites are for hetrosexual people (ie: men seeking women or women seeking men) but even on the sign up screen you have options for women seeking women and men seeking men. Really if you are gay then it's better to sign up for the gay websites. Any how, we signed up as a man seeking a woman and as the sign up screen is on the home page it took us around 20 seconds (just remember to keep the "I want to receive offers from dating direct partners" box unchecked) to avoid any spam emails.
So we are sort of approved but need to get the email confirmation link although this only seems to be for email alerts because we could continue to update our profile which is a massive 4 step process. They want to know everything from children to eye colour on step 2 then on the last step you complete a summary about yourself which takes around 24 hours to be moderated, we guess for the words that some people may use.
Once inside we are instantly presented with a page full of single women seeking men in our city (we chose London). How these are matched is anyones guess because we didn't complete anything about the type of profile we were looking for. On the profile page are questions about your ideal person you want so we completed a few of those questions and pressed save. Really there are a ton of questions in this area and once we completed these there were still folks who came up that were outside of our profile criteria. At the time we were searching the system said there were 45,209 people online which we suspect would be from all the dating direct websites and not just the UK version. To find people it's best to search as the default window/ home page provided lots of "matches" that were widely outside of our criteria.
The dating direct site looks and feels modern and easy to use although was very slow many of the times we were simply going to the profile and back. On each page was a subscription message encouring you to upgrade your account. Here's what you can do with a free subscription :
So although not a trial in the main sense because all of the following benefits are free so long as you remain a member :
So with the free service you can join up and look around the site to see if there's anyone that you may want to connect with and then if you do you need to sign up. The paid subscription packages are as follows with the six month package highlighted as a special offer at the time of writing
There are also other add on subscriptions such as "select" and "complete" - if you choose the latter which is another £14.90 per month then you can have other advantages such as integration with your mobile phone, priority placement in searches, see new members before others and use an "absence" manager if you are away. We like the upgrade for the priority which is a great way to get started and meet others.
If you choose any of the payment options you will automatically be rebilled after the period you have chosen has run out.If you like the site (which we do) then the six monthly option looks the best buy.
To sum it up - datingdirect.co.uk is a nice looking site but has no forums or message boards just to chat to others or see others experiences which should be a must in today's online dating world. But as a traditional dating site it's easy to use and navigate so is worth signing up for the free trial.
