TheDate HornyMatches

Finding your perfect match is hard enough without throwing complications of sexually transmitted diseases into the mix. That’s where PositiveLove.com hopes to come into play. Although it may have noble interests at heart, it does little to reassure us of the product it’s trying to provide. Read on for more on how this site rated . . .

Dropdown menus are handy when it comes to the profile creation process but only when there can be only one answer to a particular question, such as when you state your gender or date of birth. Positive Love’s profile creation screen is a mess due to poor usage of these menus. For example, when you come to the point where you can state the type of relationship you’re looking for, you have options such as choosing by disease or by how serious you are. To put it another way, you can’t be looking for a serious relationship with an HIV positive person but you can be looking for a serious relationship or an HIV relationship. One of the key points to any date is age but Positive Love drops the ball by asking you to enter it as opposed to entering your birth date, which could automatically change your age on the appropriate day. Also, in the sections where you can choose multiple options for questions, you need to CTRL-click to select different ones. The site doesn’t tell you that. When it comes to dating sites, little things often make the difference between a job done and one that’s well done.

Also problematic for this site is the nature of STDs. It can be an uncomfortable subject to talk about and be associated with and yet online dating is all about your picture. Well, maybe it’s not all about the picture, but it’s certainly the easiest and most common way for initial interest to be generated. Positive love has a lot of profiles without pictures and this hurts the overall usability of the site. What may work is a graduated photo system whereby you can’t see other photos until you post one or a couple of your own. This might provide a little more security for those who are uncomfortable talking about their STD’s online. Unfortunately, for now there are a lot of faceless names and profiles that lack the depth that you would expect on more traditional dating sites.

“If Positive Love hopes to make inroads against other dating sites, it needs to offer more for free.”

One of the strong points on this site is presentation. It looks professional and very slick. Whether or not this suits the target demographic may be a topic for later discussion, but Positive Love’s presentation score secures a perfect ten.

Search options also take a beating on this site. Although it did ask for my zip code, there were no options to take advantage of geographic searches by radius. There are no options available to help narrow the search based on the many details asked during the profile creation process and another downfall to this site is that it’s really only geared towards US residents.

Free access is really important to see what a site has to offer and Positive Love just doesn’t make the grade. First off, you can only send and receive messages if you’re a paid member. You can’t access chat forms or the discussion section or instant message. To boot, you can’t even see when any given member last logged on. Perhaps these features will come with time but for now, free members are out of luck.

Member stats are also very important as they give you an idea of how busy a given site is. At this point, Positive Love has very little traffic and members when compared to the larger dating sites. Niche market or not, you need members for a dating site to grow and this site has a long way to go.

If Positive Love hopes to make inroads against other dating sites, it needs to offer more for free. Right now, it’s a risky choice at best but look for this site down the line to be a leader in the very narrow field of STD dating.