eHarmony

On Tuesday members of Project Wedding got an email informing them that eHarmony had purchased the website. Looking at the home page of Project Wedding you will notice that the copyright at the bottom has been updated from WebShaka, Inc to eHarmony, Inc. The current owners, Joe and Margaret, will still maintain the site for an unknown period of time.

Project Wedding is as the name suggests, a place to help you plan your wedding. The site includes message forums and articles where you can seek advice. You can also find a list of vendors for weddings that include categories like photography, dresses and cakes. These vendor listings also include customer reviews which can be very helpful to the bride or groom to be.

What did eHarmony purchase this site? Well, it is a natural progression for the company to go from matching couples together to now help them plan a wedding. Last year eHarmony has said they were responsible for over 43,000 marriages in the United States. They already have generated goodwill with these couples and they are use to using eHarmony's service so it should be fairly easy to get them to use an online wedding planning site. This website may becoming a bit of a niche social networking site for eHarmony where couples can trade information from where the best place is to get pictures done in your city to, who has the best wedding dresses.

Currently eHarmony also runs eHarmony Marriage, which they call an online alternative to marriage counseling.

For more information about the dating service, eHarmony, please read our review.

Well it looks like eHarmony United Kingdom has been launched. Originally rumoured to open in June, 2008 the dating site is now accessible (props to the unofficial eHarmony Blog for finding out this). No official press releases as of yet have been found and no links exist on the other eHarmony sites pointing to the new UK dating site.

For a limited time when new eHarmony members living in the United Kingdom sign up, they will receive a free 90 day membership. I would assume, all current eHarmony members living in the UK who signed up at the main eHarmony.com dating service will have the option to be moved to the UK dating site to take advantage of its UK specific matching system. eHarmony United Kingdom will need to get a lot of members fast so they can start competing with other popular UK Dating Services and, giving away free memberships is one way to do it. They will just need the marketing campaign to back it up.

eHarmony UK has partnered with the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) to help predict what makes a couple compatible in the United Kingdom. The Oxford Internet Institute is a department of the University of Oxford and was founded in 2001. A research team from OII gathered relationship data from 1000 married couples living in the United Kingdom that ranged in age from 19 to 81 and with relationships that spanned from under 1 to 65 years. With this data eHarmony was able to come up with a scientific matching system based on their key dimensions of compatibility. This matching system shares many similarities with its US counterpart but differences were found by the UK research team which are now taken into account.

Visit the eHarmony United Kingdom home page or check out our eHarmony UK Review.

Related Story: eHarmony to open a dating service in China

Update - The rumor was only partly true. The free weekend is for Canadians only at eHarmony.ca.

I am not sure if it is true but I heard a rumor that eHarmony is having another Free Communication Weekend for the United States and Canada from Saturday June 28 to Tuesday, July 1. This weekend falls on Canada Day (July 1st) and is close to the US Independence Day holiday. The last free weekend at eHarmony was from May 23 to May 26 which was close to Canada's Victoria Day holiday (May 19) and also Memorial Day in the US. Maybe there is something to this rumor after all?

If you where thinking of trying out eHarmony for the first time I would wait to this Saturday so you can communicate with your matches for free. These promotions from eHarmony are usually only for new members who actually sign up on the specified weekend.

For more information on eHarmony, read our review.

The unofficial eHarmony Blog has a post about how she received a free month on eHarmony when she reported several fake profiles after communicating with members who were obviously not who they said they were. Poor english skills and huge inconsistencies where the warning flags.

No matter how hard a dating service tries, scammers are always going to get by the automated and manual checks of the dating site. Part of most dating services defences against scammers is to rely on their members to report them. In most cases people report fake profiles and move on, you never know what becomes of your report. Did the dating site follow up or did your email go straight to the trash bin? It's nice to see a service that acknowledged the problem and rewarded the members work with an additional month.

This is just good business for eHarmony. You don't want an unhappy member to go out and tell their friends.

For more information about this service, read our eHarmony Review.

MarketingWeek is reporting that OgilvyOne won the marketing account for eHarmony. I am unsure if this is the entire marketing account for eHarmony or just the United Kingdom part. eHarmony was reported to open a UK specific dating service in June (see story) but that appears to be less and less likely as there is just over a week left this month. Hopefully we will see it by summer's end. I did notice that the domain eHarmony.co.uk is registered but it currently just reroutes you to the eHarmony US site.

For more information on eHarmony, please read our review.

The unofficial eHarmony Blog got the scoop on eHarmony's traffic statistics being accessible to the public at Quantcast. eHarmony has been a Quantified Publisher since February 2008. This means the traffic information is very accurate because a script or tracking image is inserted into every page at eHarmony which allows detailed tracking of all visitors.

The first thing to realize is (if you don't know too much about this type of thing), don't worry about being tracked. It happens on most web sites. Online businesses(and blog owners) want to know about their traffic, since obviously visitors are the bread and butter. If you do worry about it, visit the sites Privacy Policy where they should tell you what is done with this information. The main things most companies want to know about visitors are:

• How many there are?
• How many come back?
• Where are they coming from?
• What do they visit on the site?