What repetitive usage of the same romantic pictures can tell you about the quality of a dating website?
The internet is full of romantic pictures of happy healthy couples doing happy healthy things. Doing sports, out with their golden children, enjoying the sunshine, or the all-time classic: eating salad. ‘Woman eating salad’ may not be a romantic picture as such, but it is the typification of the genre. So much so that the search has become a legendary spoof online, with many parody versions circulating.
These lifestyle images are the stock in trade of the advertising industry, which has always relied on the representation of idealised romance to sell anything from cars to food to mobile phones. Dating sites clearly have an even more direct interest in romantic images than most.
It is extraordinary then that so often dating websites and many other services use the exactly the same stock photos online. Despite the plethora of material available, you would be amazed how often the same romantic picture pops up.
What does this tell us about the quality of the sites we are using?
Lazy use of stock photos is not a sign of quality. If a dating service does not have the money or cannot be bothered to take its own branded images, or at the very least search out some more unusual stock photos to use, then the chances are that there are lots of corners cut in the service provision too. Indeed most of the better established dating services have their own exclusive images created and will not display pictures widely used by others.
These days you can back search images using the google image search function. This enables you to see how many times a particular image has been used on the web. So you could use this as a quality test of any dating service you were looking at signing up for. Take their main sales image from the landing page and search for it on google. If it has been used by many other services before, you might want to reconsider…
Check out our top recommendations for the best dating services available in the UK and find yourself a service that delivers genuine romance.
Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Submitted by George Sanders on