lol...
The best way to date is to go out on the town, try to get as many numbers as possible, from there text like crazy and setup as many dates as possible. Sure you may go 1 for 10 finding a good one, but my experience online is much, MUCH worse than that. I'd rather grab numbers completely hammered with full beer goggles on then try to look at profile's featuring "myspace angles", no matter how ugly you are, if you have 1000 pictures I'm sure there's one or two where you look ok right? And wouldn't it be funny if those were the ones that landed on your lavalife profile? hmm
If you're a cheap SOB just use craigslist, if you don't mind spending a few pennies join lavalife (you can search by local radius), it's considerably better than Plenty of Crap.
On this end of the world koreancupid.com and japancupid.com are incredible, I just log in and within 20 minutes have 3 or 4 girls messaging me, I've even had a few message me within a few blocks from here and we went out for a drink 30 minutes later. Crazyness.