I would like to start off by welcoming you all to a new series of posts that we are going to be doing on the Datepad blog regarding the inner workings of a full featured, free internet dating site. My name is Regan Johnson, and I am the Technical Director here at Datepad. Our goal for this segment is to bring the tech savvy and tech interested crowd a closer look at some programming tactics, design philosophies, and monetizing schemes that are put in place on Datepad.com on a daily basis.

When starting to develop Datepad, we had many team brainstorming sessions on the topic of how we could offer more features all while keeping the site easy enough for even the most novice user. This is one of our core goals when adding any new feature to Datepad - ease of use. Everything we have done has been meticulously thought out and calculated from our comprehensive business plan, to even the smallest of features.

The result is a site that rivals even the most expensive paid sites on the internet in terms of features and accessibility. A lot of planning went into the mechanics of each system (messaging, nudges, photos, articles, forums, etc.) and how they interacted with other systems. Since our initial plan, there have been many additions and tweaks that would have been a nightmare to implement without such a strong initial blueprint.

It has been said by many analysts that you will see a strong decline in fly by night web businesses that don’t have a solid business plan. It is always important to work a new feature out a few steps ahead, and take into consideration all of the possible outcomes or future feature implementations. Even if you decide not to include a specific function at the time of launch, having a solid framework that can support this feature down the road will save many hours or days of development.

In further posts, I will be discussing topics such as our picture upload system, the constant war against spammers (and what we are doing to stay on top), our advanced search techniques, our proprietary matching technology and much more! I look forward to bringing our users a more intimate and closer look at Datepad!