Lavalife (Lava Life) Review

Lavalife, long one of the online dating community's most trusted leaders in matching singles across the internet, has recently revamped their dating website and has returned bigger and badder than ever. Somehow this dating site has managed to add a host of new features to give you more choices while at the same time simplifying the experience as a whole.

As before, there are three communities of personals in which you can put your profile and search: Adult Dating (casual stuff), Relationship (serious stuff), and Intimate Encounters (naughty stuff). When you sign up for the first time you'll be entered into both of the first two, but Lavalife wisely gets you to tweak that profile for the intimate area. Move from one community to another with one simple click.

Creating a personal profile is surprisingly quick, as those in the know have clearly wanted to make it easy for new members to get started quickly and not have to fumble with page after page of lists and menus. If you wish, you can fill out a section of  "interests", but it's not necessary and who reads those things anyhow? After all, the important stuff is the visual evidence, and by that we mean pictures.

What's FREE!

• Free to Sign Up
• Post up to three unique profiles
• Send and receive smiles.
• Reply to members who contact you
• Search and view profiles
• Watch video ads
• Free email alerts

Lavalife makes using pictures easy - you can have your simple profile picture, add several pictures that are easily viewable in a "picture gallery" by other members, or set up a "backstage" that you can let certain people see but hide from others. It's also quite easy to add videos of yourself to this section, and with every digital camera out there having a simple video function, why the heck not?

Your Personal Profile

• Post up to 30 photos to your profile,  your picture gallery or backstage.
• Upload your own video ad or record one right online. ( allowed up to 6)
• Make your profile public, or by invitation only.

From "My Home", you can get to your various profiles, search in each category using 9 different methods including video and gallery, and also access two truly useful tools. The first is "The Party", an advanced chat room that allows you to post a picture and self-description than talk to other online members of the party.

The second is "Entertainment" where you'll find all manner of distractions. There's Lavalife's Click Magazine, chock full of articles on dating-related issues that are actually useful and frequently irreverently funny, Web horoscopes, member blogs, and urban city guides for daters.

On top of all this, through your account you can sign up for weekly Lavalife Notes that updates you with new articles (and also remind you to get your butt online and search) and the "gal alert" which sends you the profiles of nine new gals every week. Presumably you can sign up for "guy alert", if you wish!

Lavalife recently started offering forums on the dating site, although still in the experimental stage, members can ask questions and post comments on just about anything. Available in all three communities - Dating Relationship, and Intimate, and with dozens of topics to choose from, you'll definitely find something you want to talk about.

Another great change made by Lavalife is their pricing scheme. It used to be that you paid for credits and then used those credits to email other members, which may have led to people not emailing unless they were dead sure that the person being emailed was worth it. Now, they use the tried and true subscription system, charging a flat fee per month or a pretty sweet discount for signing up for a three-month period! Just to try it out, you can sign up for a full 24 hour period free of charge. This should give you plenty of time to test out all the cool features, and if you happen to see someone you like - you also have unlimited mail privileges, so go ahead and email anyone and everyone you want.

All in all, the Lavalife Personals site has really benefited from all the changes. This clearly isn't a dating site that relies simply on having one of internet biggest membership base... they have clearly taken steps to make sure you have an online dating experience that's not only fun but functional too.