Dating and hook-up sites have been around for a while now and there are loads of them to choose from when you want to join an online community and maybe find that special person. I have to admit that I’d never heard of Zoosk (just their Facebook ads) before and so I thought I would give it a trial run. I started with the first basic page and followed the procedure for joining; and I thought you might be interested to know how it all works.

Its one of those sites where you need to register before you can do anything, but it took all of one minute to do this and cost me nothing. Enter a valid email address and make up a password, you get a validation email sent to you straight away, you click that, you go back to a new page and enter the two words, by way of a further anti-spam/hack measure, and there you go, you’re in.

So, step one was simple and fast. Step two was slightly more involved and here is where it is important to remember the number one rule of joining a dating/hook-up site: be honest. There is no point in putting you details down in such a way that you appear to be some kind of Greek good, or goddess, when you’re not – it will only lead to disappointment later. The first page of details is a simple one with the basics like your name, the name you want to be known by, your age and basic stats, and the ‘match’ you are looking for – this is a site for gay, straight, and bi folk, all sexualities are welcome. Some fields are required here, you have to fill them out, others are not and you can even skip the page if you want to. I won ‘two Zoosk Coins; for logging in, but as I’d not seen any other details about the site yet I had no idea what that meant.

Now you run through the other parts of the setting up process, your location, more about you, you can download a chat player for later use, you can upload photos, put down what your likes and dislikes are, tell your story and put in some answers to the ‘ice breakers’ questions, to give some more background., All this goes on your ‘date card.’

So far the process had been easy and simple and you can miss it all out if you simply want to explore the site. Finally getting round to the home page (I did have to set my location before I could do that), I had a search option already set for me, but I could change it, there was news on recent community posts, and some boxes showing me my profile status. There wasn’t much else here as the location I had chosen was obviously a quiet one, there were no local events posted, but had I been in, say, London there may have been loads. But I tried the search, to see if there was anyone else registered within 30 kilometres of where I lived. There were! (Exclamation mark because I am very remote.)

And what was nice here was that Zoosk works like a cross between a standard dating site and something like Facebook – I could send winks, and gifts, chat privately and send private emails. There are also various other ways to search, you’ve got a private email box, plenty of help and even safety tips for blind dating, you can report profiles and abuse, and there is a forum.

It’s all rather new here but obviously growing fast due to the free sign up – I wondered how they made their money, and then noticed that you can upgrade for premium services, have more activity and get further involved, but the prices were very reasonable.

But what I liked most about Zoosk, compared to other dating sites, is that it was well designed, easy to use and fast, and I found members who fitted my ‘match’ locally, and, considering where I live, that really is saying something. Find and meet gay men here.