As someone who has used both Skritter and Italki a lot, I'd like to speak in Skritter's support - it's a wonderful way to learn characters - the best I've found so far, way better than traditional rote memorization, and good enough to let me keep up with Korean students in 听写 tests. 

While it is expensive, bear in mind that you only pay the fee while adding new characters, and that you can work on everything you have already learnt for free (which is what I've been doing the last few months, though I am about to sign up again).

Handwriting itself is less useful in the modern age, and I virtually never use it, but the point that they make is true - if you want your reading to get to a good or even professional level, you need to be able to tell the characters apart at a glance,  at least for the first 1000-3000, I found that incredibly hard to do without writing them. It's a big step in the learning process and key to high level functionality. Even if what you learn decays and you find you can't write, it will still help you read.

HLRN is right about the importance of stroke order for looking up words and has some pretty insightful comments overall - I agree adverts should always be made crystal clear from the start. I'm sure italki users want to hear about  italki's partners and other language learning stuff, so no need to pretend adverts aren't adverts.

Just signed up for the October language learning challenge! Good luck to anyone else who is taking part.