14 DAY TRIAL // Ready made websites are not a novelty anymore for the Internet domain. And their design varies according to the customer's needs and wishes. Their price is not modest either, as they can reach to cost more than $1000. As for utility, functionality and profit, only the buying customer can answer you.
Dating Pro is a ready made website equipped with all the necessary options for both the admin and its users. The price is extremely low - as Pilot Group, the developer, makes it available for only $399 - if you take into consideration that the program comprises everything that is necessary for the admin and other similar programs are thrice as much.
The software comes equipped with a manual for harnessing all the details and making the most of your website and a full installation guide. The program has two modes available: one for the users and one for the admins. I will not get into any details regarding the member's activity as the admin part is the most interesting and richest in information and possibilities.
Logging in to your administrator account will give you full privileges and you can rule over your subjects (users of the website) by deleting them, editing their profile, adding users, posting news and banners, viewing bad words alerts, sending messages to users etc.
All the options available for the Administrators of the website are displayed in the left side of the window. There are four management areas and the Site Statistics. User Management, Site Content Management, Site Settings Management and Modules Management are for the modules available. Site Statistics will let you know the total number of users registered on your site, the number of users that are currently online, in chats, registered in the current day, the number of users that have registered in the previous month, as well as the most often logged in and popular users.
In admin mode you will also have access to all the materials that can help you in configuring the website and revealing you all the "secrets" you have to know for the website to work. Besides, the forum topics will also answer some of your questions. The administrators have the possibility of entering a chat room and talk directly to one of the Dating Pro operators. It took about a minute to start talking to a live operator ready to help me with my problems.
User Management lets the administrator handle all the user accounts (description, personal info, uploaded files and perfect match details). The admin can send private messages to system users, the downfall of this is that mass messaging is not available, so an important communicate regarding all regular users or a certain group would take a lot of time and effort.
Groups of users are available and the administrators can give certain permissions to users pertaining to one group or another. Of course, new groups can be added and the existing ones can be modified. If the admin decides that certain users deserve special privileges than s/he can change their status as they see fit.
Such a website is meant to generate profit so the administrators should see their paying customers. This feature is available in Billing>Users billing. The group with the least privileges will be free, but as the price per group goes higher and higher the user permissions grow as well.
In order for a user to change the group s/he has to pay an admin defined amount of money. The fee can be for a certain number of days, months or years. The procedure is not complicated and the user will have to buy points that are equivalent to the fee. Account is the key to modifying the group and buying points. According to the groups created by the admin the user will be able to choose the desired group and viewing their fees.
Site Content Management lets the user add news and create feeds for the titles. This way the users will be able to read some extra information besides browsing around for the soul mate. This section of the administrator panel allows adding advertising banners, management of the bad words used in chat rooms etc.
To change the set profile questionnaire, the user has to go to Reference. The good thing is that it can be translated into other system languages. The sections available are Description, Countries, Languages, Nationalities, Personal Data, Interests, Relationships etc. You can actually modify every field and rename it the way you want.
In Bad words area the administrator can view the alerts and can add the words that should be included into this category. Area Editor allows creating the Help for moving around the website, adding testimonials from users, editing the general conditions, success stories, the Contact Us field.
Site Settings Management section configures the entire site and the administrator can set the options for Administrator info, Language Uploads limits, database info, site template and miscellaneous (show user's zip-code, second name in profile view, use uploaded image resize, photos approve etc.).
The modules included in the software comprise Chat, Newsletters, Affiliate, Events, Forum, MS-Analysis and Poll. Each of these sections contains settings of its own. In Chat - for example - the administrator can edit the rooms and create some new ones (either private or public), view the messages from each of the rooms, track if some user added another user to ignore or ban list. By logging into chat, the administrator can ban any user from the chat rooms and remove the bans.
Newsletters modules is where you can manage the email alerts (for perfect matches, visiting the personal page, site news) and newsletters (a mass messaging option), the attachments, SMTP servers, mailing lists, subscribers etc.
To gather more profit, there is also the option of affiliates and manage them. Viewing the activity and the statistics is no sweat, as these options are all included in here.
Ms-Analysis is the module I liked the most as it gives all the necessary information about the frequency the users visit the site, the browsers, OS, search engines they use, the countries they are from, site statistics, visitor statistics or graphics. The most visited pages can also be viewed in here.
The last module available is Polls. They allow you to get a review on some questions of the users. The default ones can be edited and the admins can create some new ones. The templates used can be modified the way you want and the percentage bar for each answer can be customized by changing its colors.
The general site statistics are available in the main page of the admin screen and they will display the total number of users, how many are currently online and in chats, the number of system users registered today or those that are logged in most often. The administrators will also be provided information regarding the most popular as well as the least used tools in the previous month.
The Good
The users have the chance to use an internal instant messaging service which allows adding contacts, or to enter chat rooms.
The admin can create chat rooms (public or password protected) for the users and use the bots for animating the chat. The bots can fire up the conversation until new users enter the chat room.
The live operators gave me all the information needed and assisted me through all the steps I had to take for the features to work right.
Both the admin panel and the users are easy to handle and you will get almost all the information you need in order to perfectly manage the application. In user mode there is the option of changing the color theme (there are six variants).
The Bad
When receiving a message the user is not alerted in any way and has to check the account messages in order to see the piece of information.
Top 10 Users does not include the nick or the email of the user, and when performing a search, the admin will have to do it by name or surname only.
There must be a demo restriction for adding a new member as the pictures added for the Softpedia member could not be visible, as hard as I tried.
The Truth
Installing the bots was a bit of an issue for me as I could not load them. I got the "Could not create DB table 'pro_fc_bot'" message. But from what I have talked with the operators they are ready to help you with the problem.
All in all, the price is just great and the application will provide the necessary tools for managing all the users. The software will "suffer" further improvements based on your requests and you can talk to the developer in order to create your own, customized version of the site.
Again, a big plus for the online operators that will take it a step at a time and will not lose their patience when it comes to helping you. The connection is established very fast and they will not keep you waiting.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
