Overview

Dating Direct are undoubtably one of the UK's online dating giants and claim to have over 5 million members and the largest membership base in the UK, although their rivals Match.com make the same claim, so one of them is bending the truth a little... we don't know who!

Services include real-time one-to-one chats, simple compatibility tests that you can set yourself, strict site code of conduct and member review, and free registration.

Dating Direct is an extremely neat and well presented site, with easy user navigation. Very easy to get up and running, but not lacking in the features department at all. Everything from the search facility, to the overall value for money on Dating Direct is good, thumbs up all round from us...

Just one concern - Dating Direct promote their 'Dating Direct Affinity' service (a rival to the 'eHarmony' service) fairly intrusively whilst members are logged in. It certainly could become annoying, and makes us wonder what the future holds for the traditional Dating Direct service itself.

Who is it for?

General online dating service; covers all ages and all of the UK.

Profile creation

How long to fill out a profile? Approximately: 45 minutes

Creating your profile and getting up and running on Dating Direct is easy and strikes a good balance of having enough detail, without taking an age to complete.

A good thing is you can skip all of the questions and check out who is online straight away, going back to bulk out your profile later. This is a great way of getting a feel of the website before spending time filling out your profile.

You are presented with the usual questions to answer; basic details, description, lifestyle and your perfect match.

The Your Lifestyle section is split into 3 parts:

• tastes (music, film, pets)
• activities (entertainment, sports)
• habits (smoke, drink)

This bit is very simple; no difficult questions here. You are required to tick what you like, for instance, music tastes and sports you like, etc. The only problem here is a user navigation one. Surprisingly for a big player like Dating Direct, the drop down menu is pretty poor. For example, a question may have over 20 possible options to tick/check, yet the drop down menu only shows 4 at at time, making you have to scroll down a lot to see all the possible answers. This means you cannot see all the possible options at one time, and you may miss some out.

The next section is Your Perfect Match which has the usual questions about what you want to find in a match, such as personality, character, interests and of course, appearance. Like the whole Dating Direct profile creation process, this is simple and all of the questions are easy to answer, unlike some of the more robust and scientific online dating sites. Again though, Dating Direct have not got a flawless process as they seem to have an irritating omission. When selecting the details for your perfect match, they include no option for 'no preference'. You can actually leave this blank if you don’t want to pick, but at first we were confused and thought we had to put an answer down in order to progress, so selected an option when we really wanted to put 'no preference'.

So, a word of caution; remember that you don’t have to answer these perfect match questions if there’s a question where you don't have a particular preference.

The final section is the Personal Ad wher you have up to 2000 characters to describe yourself. Dating Direct actually provide very little guidance on what to say here and have no advice centre to consult unlike other sites. If you're finding it difficult to write about yourself you might like to get help from professional dating profile writers.

Features

Once you have gone through the initial profile creation Dating Direct present you with the option of also completing your very own compatibility test for others to complete, called My Test.

This is a mini compatibility test for people to complete when they go onto your profile, or you can invite people to complete it when you go on their profile. You can choose pre-set questions that Dating Direct give you, or write your own (but the latter means they have to moderate it, and this can take upto 48 hours, although it's very unlikely to take this long)

You have the option to create a video introduction of yourself, up to 1 minute. This is easy to do if you have a webcam.

There is also an instant messenger chat as well as video chat feature, which is good to make sure the profile picture and the person on the end of the video chat are the same!

Searching

The search feature on Dating Direct is very comprehensive and gives you a lot of scope.

You can do the basic search with age range and radius from your postcode. There is also an advanced search where you can customise your search with a huge list of characteristics such as physique, activities, interests, tastes, character, etc.

As well as this, you can search by username or keywords if you wish.

There is also a 1-click search tool which shows:

• your perfect matches
• you’re their perfect match
• it's their birthday
• you both share the same birthday

These last 2 add a quirky common ground which, you never know, could be an icebreaker if you decide to get in touch with them!

Viewing Profiles

Similar compatibility criteria section to Match whereby it shows up the areas your compatible when viewing someones profile. However, because there are fewer questions to complete when registering than on Match, this is a little weaker. It’s still useful though.

Contacting members

Dating Direct have the generic 'wink' feature which lets the person know that you’re interested. If you find someone you’re interested in, you can click on the email tab to get in touch with them.

Email alerts

As soon as you fill out your basic details, such as where you live and what age date your looking for you receive an email with some potential matches.

Your email alerts are also fully customisable. So you can opt in or out of getting alerts about winks, someone visits your page, message received, and so on.

You can also opt into Mobile Phone alerts, charged at network rate.

Value for money

If you are looking to join one of the largest dating sites in the UK, then Dating Direct offer one of the best trades offs for size versus money.

They are indeed near the higher end of the cost bracket but you do get what you pay for. They offer a great set of features and the site navigation and ease of use is right up there with the best. They are very similar to Match.com in almost every area, and so by being that little bit cheaper on their 6 month package, Dating Direct just edge their big rival on value.

Best bits

Their size in the industry mean you get a great looking website, a trusted service and some top range features.

Worst bits

As one of our customers has commented on our customer reviews, Dating Direct's promotion of 'Dating Direct Affinity' (their eHarmony type service) is irritating to logged in users.

Pricing

1 month: £29.99
3 month: £59.97
6 month: £77.94