Free Single Dating is an online dating web site community aimed at UK singles, requiring a scalable web site design and development as the site’s membership base grows.

Web Site Design

The web site design focused on:

• Pushing non-members to sign up, via call to actions, registration forms and ‘locked’ content
• Easy to use navigation, allowing members to quickly perform a number of functions
• Easy to edit profile
• Simple search functionality
• Robust messaging system, including interactive alerts when new messages are received

We achieved the above aims by starting with a basic layout, slowly adding some simple colour and logo design to the general outline, the focus being on the user generated content.

The design made use of good spacing and layout to ensure easy readability.

Web Site Development

Our in house MVC framework, Harmony, provides a scalable development platform for both the front end web site and back end administration section. Whilst existing development platforms work in a similar way, none of them provided the lightweight, robust and scalable architecture this web site required (or a sufficiently robust administrative area), to ensure stability in future growth and visitor numbers.

Harmony's modular MVC (model-view-controller) architecture ensures it can run a variety of scalable web sites and applications, from dating platforms through to bespoke invoicing systems.

Whilst site users can perform a number of specific functions, such as search profiles, edit their profile, message individuals and report content, site administrators can approve, modify and delete profiles, messages and content.

All search engine optimisation is provided by Harmony’s sitemaps and SEO modules, therefore providing search engine friendly content to maximise site traffic and SERPs.

Harmony's Sitemap Module, providing details of all available, indexable pages and profiles.

As with all work, the design was coded in XHTML and CSS, using progressive enhancements in CSS and Javascript for newer web browsers, whilst ensuring legacy web browsers could still browse and view the web site’s information.