Redbird Singles

Red Bird Singles is a dating site meant primarily for the students, staff, alumni and friends of Illinois State University. The design of the site is nice and clean. It looks good and is very easy to use. I found signing up for the site to be a breeze. Your profile in this site can have a lot of details in it, but they let you skip a lot of that during the sign up process if you want. Once inside, however, I saw the primary problem with the site. Almost all of the members live in the area surrounding the school. If you happen to live in that area you are in luck. If you don't, then the site probably won't be of much use to you.

There are about 600 members in this site with women making up about 40% of them. You can search these profiles using the basic search option which allows you to specify an age range and distance from you and filter your results using those criteria. There is also an advanced search option called Smart Match which uses the details from your profile to better match you with other people. If you skipped filling in the details of your profile when you signed up you will need to go back and fill all of that information in before the Smart Match will work effectively for you.

As nice as the search options are, sadly, they are the only real options on this site. There are no chat rooms, user forums or instant messaging. I really would have liked to have seen some form of interactive feature here so I was disappointed that there were none.

What it comes down to is this: If you live near Illinois State University or you are affiliated with the school you should give this site a look. Signing up, searching and looking at people's profiles is all free. You only have to get a paid membership if you want to contact someone directly so you are out nothing to give it a try. If you don't live near the school then the site won't be worth checking out because the odds are against you having any members that live near you. This reality and the lack of extra features is why I scored the site on the low end, but those who are near the school should ignore my rating and give it a look.