Resources: LavaLife.com

Click here to visit LavaLife.com

Lavalife is an enthusiastic dating community with great people, interesting opinion polls where members vote for dating-related issues and Cosmo-style feature articles to help you cope with Dating and more.

Lavalife does have its downfalls. The designers sure did a great job creating a live-wire dating environment. But in doing so they made the website slightly difficult to use. Our tester's pet peeves:

The website is divided into 3 sections: Dating, Relationships and Intimate.

So what's the problem with that, eh? It's this- When you are in one particular section, you cannot view messages in the other two sections. And you cannot be in all the sections at once. If you get a message through the relationship area while you're chatting in the dating area, you need to click through to the relationship area to read it. Precious seconds are lost while the page loads (remember, this site is graphics-heavy!) In the meantime, the member who was chatting with you in the dating section is starting to wonder.

Our tester also noticed that members would instant-message her long after she had properly logged off from the site, meaning that they could not see the change in her online status and ended up wasting their messaging credits.

Since Lavalife is a pay-per-message website, they need to look into this. Unless it's deliberate!

Lavalife does give you the option of Mail messages. Unlike instant messages, you need to pay for Mail messages only once per member. Once you have established a mail link with the member, all further messages are free.

The lavalife chat window is slow-loading and pesky. Our tester recommends switching to instant messenger as soon as possible. It saves money on future chat sessions but most important- you enjoy a smooth, glitch-free chat experience.

Lavalife won't store your messages beyond 7 days, so if you have plans to take off on a week-long vacation, make sure you save everything on your hard drive first or risk losing everything!

Customer service, or the lack of it, is another big concern, but persistence helps. Outright rudeness helps even more.

Even with all its downfalls, our tester found that Lavalife delivered the best value for her dating buck. Since the website is pay-per-message, it allowed her to stay inactive as her priorities shifted and use her balance credits when she once again had the time to start dating.

Unlike websites that charge a flat monthly fee, Lavalife doesn't make you pay when you're not using it. That makes the per-message payment model far superior, even though you might balk at the real cost per message. Definitely not for people who aren't choosy about who they message!

Click here to visit LavaLife.com