Justin Han in action |
Photo © 2008 Greg Letts |
[Standard boring disclaimer] Listed below are my reviews of other Table Tennis sites that I have visited. These are my own personal opinions regarding these sites, and I'm not getting any financial benefit from these reviews (unfortunately!), apart from maybe a return link.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on site design or anything else, and I'm not claiming to be unbiased either, but I will give you my unvarnished opinion of what I like and dislike without fear or favour.
Keep in mind the ratings are based upon my own personal liking for the site and how often I use it, and not some standard list of rules or checkpoints that I follow. So YMMV! [/Standard boring disclaimer]
Any webmasters disagreeing with my ratings or wanting to point out my inaccuracies or their updates can give me a serve here.
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NA |
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NA |
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One of a Kind Trading - useful info on Chinese Rubbers |
NA |
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Ping Skills - home of Australian Olympic Coach Alois Rosario and Olympic Player Jeff Plumb |
NA |
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Table Tennis World - online store from Australia's Paul Pinkewich |
NA |
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Croydon & District Table Tennis Association Inc. - website for the biggest association in Australia |
NA |
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Robbins Table Tennis Specialists - table tennis supplier |
NA |
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ping pong central - ping-pong table dealer |
NA |
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table-tennis-videos.com - what do you think? |
NA | |
Training in the Chinese National Table Tennis Training Center |
NA | |
TTV Rimlingen-Bachem e.V. - German club website with news, photos and videos. It also uses Joomla for the site management. | NA | |
Ulmo-Blades - German specialist in table tennis blades | NA |
http://www.tabletennis.about.com/
Date of Review: 15th March 2005
Definitely a must for me - I've spent far too much time browsing and posting in the forum on this site!
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
Worth it just for the forum and Sean's posts.
Date of Review: 16th March 2005
This is one of the sites on my occasional list - where I will come and have a look every so often just to see what's new. As megaspin are table tennis suppliers, you can expect to see a fair amount of self-promotion on their pages - what else would you expect?
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
Pretty much what you would expect from a Table Tennis equipment supplier site. Great for browsing equipment and ordering, so-so on the forum, and could be better on tips, articles etc.
Sunday 9th October 2005
Jonathan Roberts writes:
Greg,
FYI, www.megaspin.net has a free email service, with minimal spam. This is very handy, and I recommend it to anyone.
IMHO, that should give them an extra bat in your ratings.
Cheers,
Jonathan 8)
Greg replies:
That's true - but I have my own email service now (yay!)- so I don't need it (although I agree it sounds very useful for other readers). But since the reviews are from the point of view of how handy the website is to me, my rating remains unchanged.
Greg ;)
Date of Review: 16th March 2005
I hadn't really looked at this site for a year or two, but came back to it recently whilst checking out other table tennis sites and how they do their design. This site is more of a compilation site, collecting many of the articles and videos from other sites in one location.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
This would have been a 3 bat site 18 months or so ago, when the collection of articles and videos were all fairly fresh. Now, while the articles hold their value, the site could use updating more often to make it worth coming back more than every year or so.
Date of Review: 18th March 2005
I think I first noticed this site about a year and a half ago when reading in Denis' Table Tennis forum, and other members were asking Geoff about his website. Figuring that any Aussie table tennis website is a good thing, I naturally went to take a look. It seemed to be mainly an equipment selling website, with the occasional article thrown in. I usually have a look every couple of months - has anything changed in the meantime?
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
For the person looking to browse equipment before ordering, this is a great place to go and compare blades, rubbers etc. Extra kudos for their sponsorship program - where do I apply?
http://www.hal-pc.org/~canupnet/mainindex.html
Date of Review: 22nd March 2005
Whew! What can I say? This site by Terry and Sue Canup is bigger than Ben Hur and obviously the work of people devoted to Table Tennis - you'd have to be to put together so much content. You can while away a whole day just following the Table Tennis Links section.
The Good:
The Bad:
(Note - GL 4th April 2005: Terry Canup was kind enough to point out some workarounds to the last two points above, he writes -
'By the way, a couple of little tricks about the site. If you don't like the frames Canupnet header on the links page, there is a quick back door to get around it. On the main page, right hand column, click on Table Tennis Links Equipment.
This gets you by the header. It's they way I navigate the site. I have the frames version up there to discourage page copying. We found more than a dozen sites had simply copied our page links (all the way down to the background and formatting) and posted them on their sites as their own work.
This is not a huge problem, except they are never maintained! People were complaining to us that the stolen pages had bad links in them, like we could go to the guys site and fix them.
:-)
Downside to this navigation trick is that you don't get the cute cartoon on the opening links page.)
Also, newer links tend to be near the top of lists, except on the equipment page which is alphabetical.'
Many thanks for the info Terry - I'll make sure that I use that next time I'm on Canupnet. It's nice to see someone who cares enough to explain how his site works!
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
More links to TT sites than you can poke a stick at, plus plenty of other stuff too. How much more can you expect from one site? Worth coming back to, although you may find it difficult to know what content has changed since your last visit - after surfing the links you probably won't care though. After all, over a million page hits can't be wrong!
Also, as noted above, Terry and Sue are prompt to reply to emails, and obviously care about helping others get the most out of their site - I'll have to add on another half a bat for that, bring Canupnet up to 4 bats!
Date of Review: 23rd March 2005
Denis' Table Tennis World is another of the Table Tennis sites I visit frequently, mainly to read and post in its forum. There is plenty more on the site to see than just the forum though.
(Note - GL 8th April 2005: Denis has been in touch with me to point out a few more features of his site that he thought I missed in my initial review - I've added these features below in italics - thanks for the information Denis!)
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
A good forum, plenty of articles and other goodies as well. Almost up to the standard of the About Table Tennis site, but needs an equivalent of Sean O'Neill and a bit more activity on the forum to bring it up to that level. A fine website nonetheless.
In light of the extra information from Denis, I'll have to re-evaluate his rating - and it's true that I do use his site more often than Canupnet, which I have given a 4 bat rating. But I don't want to downgrade Canupnet either (since they are such nice people), so I have decided to raise Denis' Table Tennis World's rating to 4 and a half bats. However, I still feel that the About.com is my favourite site overall, so I'll have to lift that too, making it 5 bats to reflect my own preferences.
Date of Review: 24th March 2005
I first became aware of the NATTC website when I asked on the About.com forum about the etiquette regarding using other people's photographs on my website. Mike Wetzel, the USATT State Coordinator for Alabama, graciously offered to see if he could get permission for me to use the pictures on the NATTC site. Since most of the photographs I wanted were by Chip Patton, he contacted Chip and asked if I could use them, and Chip kindly assented. Thanks guys!
Having said all that, I may be a bit biased in my review - but then you did read the standard disclaimer at the top of the page, didn't you?
The site itself is concerned with the history and current doings of the North Alabama Table Tennis Club, and that is exactly what you get. No forum, no shops, no training articles - just the facts, ma'am.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
No frills, forum, training articles or videos. Just a site about the North Alabama Table Tennis Club and everyone in it. But that's the name of the site - so what else would you expect? Does exactly what it sets out to do - tells you all about the NATTC. And if the rest of the members are as friendly as Mike and Chip, it should be a great place to play table tennis at!
http://ttenis.customer.netspace.net.au/
Date of Review: 25th March 2005
If you have been web surfing for table tennis pages for any amount of time, chances are you have visited Doug's homepage - it pretty much pops up in any search on table tennis you care to mention, and on most of the Links pages on the major sites.
Looking beyond that, Doug's table tennis site is there to cater for the Tasmanian table player, along with some links to the main sites around the world.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
This site does exactly what it says on the home page - it keeps you up to date with Tasmanian Table Tennis. Doug's also done a great job of getting his site 'out there' in cyberspace - a great bit of advertising for Tasmanian Table Tennis and Tasmania in general as well!
Date of Review: 27th March 2005
I haven't been to PongWorld all that often, but I've seen it come up a few times in the Google searches, so I decided to take a proper look around and report back.
PongWorld is a pretty good site allround, and it has quite a few good ideas in place, but it's still the sort of site where I would come back every few months rather than every couple of days.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
I quite like this site, and it should be applauded for having a number of initiatives that I haven't seen often elsewhere, but I can't shake the feeling that it is lacking a bit of depth - I guess I prefer a few ideas that are done really well rather than lots of ideas that are halfway there. Mind you, this will probably improve as more players go to PongWorld and contribute. What are you waiting for?
http://www.ttnsw.org.au/index.html
Date of Review: 6th April 2005
As an Australian myself, I make it a habit to browse the home sites for our various State Associations. The Table Tennis New South Wales site is one that I check back on every couple of months just to see if anything new has cropped up. So let's take a look and see what we can find ...
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
On the whole, a good site for the average NSW table tennis player. It gives them where to play, registration forms, some news every few months, state rankings and the calendar of events. A good competent effort from my NSW colleagues. A bit of a site redesign by someone with an artist's eye might improve the overall look - but give me the substance over the gloss every time.
http://www.tabletennisworld.ws/
Date of Review: 7th April 2005
This is a relatively new Aussie site, which is just starting to find it's feet and hopefully take off. I come here around once a day to check the forum and make the occasional post.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
This site has all the ingredients in place to be a very useful resource for Australian table tennis players. All it needs now is to get enough of us on the site to make it all come to life. Goodness knows we Aussies could use a really good website and forum, could this be the one? Stay tuned folks ...
Date of Review: 12th April 2005
From time to time (about every 3 months or so) I like to check out the Canadian website - mainly in the past to have a look at their online magazine - 'Match Point'. Now it's time to have a proper look through and see what I may have been missing in the past.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
This site is one of those websites that you come away from thinking, 'not bad - but it could have been so much more'. It looks nice and is easy to get around, but I came away not really that much the wiser about table tennis in Canada. Sure, there are plenty of links to tournament results on the welcome page, but what about the other things happening in Canadian table tennis? It needs a bit more meat to add to the eye candy on the site - maybe Canadian players are too busy playing table tennis to write anything for their national website?
http://www.tabletennis.org.au/
Date of Review: 15th April 2005
This is the official home site for Australian Table Tennis, and as such you might be expecting something with all the latest bells and whistles etc. Instead, what you get is a simple, straightforward site that covers the basics without too much extra. I usually take a look every couple of months just to see if anything has changed.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
There is really nothing wrong with the site, and quite a few nice touches, but as the official site for Australian Table Tennis, I can't help wishing that it was a bit more on the jazzy side. A bit more in the way of news and recent information wouldn't hurt either - at present I'd probably keep coming back every few months or so - there's no real reason to return more often.
Date of Review: 20th April 2005
I haven't been to this site all that often, but after having a bit of a look around today I'll be sure to have a come back every few weeks from here on in. It's a very nice site indeed.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
The more I browsed around this site, the more I found to like about it. I'll be coming back here more often to check out the rest of the tournament reviews and see what else has been updated.
http://www.cvonline.biz/borkoandson/index.html
Date of Review: 30th April 2005
I received the following email on the 22nd April, when I was on holiday.
I'm a custom blade maker. Here is the web site for my blades. Feel free to list this link on your web site as "Borko & Son" Custom Blades.
http://www.cvonline.biz/borkoandson/index.html
I like your web site job well done.
Very Best Regards,
Borko
Being relatively new to the web scene, I'm still a sucker for nice feedback, so I thought I would spread the good karma around and check out Borko's website and put up a link for him. So off I went to take a look and report back to my readers.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
Well, that's it for one of the smallest websites that I have reviewed. The blades look very professionally crafted. There's no links from this site to anywhere else - so it's a bit of a dead end for table tennis websurfers. If anybody has used any of Borko & Son's blades - why don't you let me know what you think about them - and I'll add it to the review.
All up, I would normally give the site half a bat since it's not very useful for me, but since the blades look so nice on the website, it seems a bit wrong to cut a blade in half for the rating - so I'll give it one bat!
http://www.tabletennisdayton.com/
Date of Review: 3rd May 2005
During a discussion on a thread on the About.com forum regarding good sportmanship at the Buckeye Open, the webmaster for Table Tennis Dayton, William McLaughlin, and I agreed to exchange links. I'd had a look around his site on the odd occasion in the past, which is mainly intended to "bring to the region of Dayton, Ohio, a top-notch website and online information center for all things Table Tennis". Has William succeeded? Let's give Table Tennis Dayton a thorough going over!
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
I think on the whole you would have to agree that William has succeeded in his quest to make a top-notch website, not just for Dayton, but for anywhere. This site will go on my list of those to check back on every month or so - congrats Bill!
http://www.rmcafee.com/index.html
Date of Review: 11th May 2005
Richard McAfee, a USATT National Coach, was kind enough to email me and offer me the use of the coaching articles on his site. As a thank you for his kind offer, I'm writing this review of his website.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
While I may not be unbiased with relation to this site, I think that anyone who has put in as much effort as Richard McAfee has in writing the sheer volume of useful table tennis articles that he has deserves some recognition for his efforts. So it's 3 bats from me - and keep an eye out on this site for some of Richard's articles, coming soon - thanks muchly Richard!
As part of my quest to get Greg's Table Tennis pages noticed on the web, I contacted David Marcus of Boston Table Tennis Center, asking for an exchange of links. David was nice enough to link to me, and asked me to put a link on my site for Ratings Central in return. So here is the link (click on the picture to the left) and a review of the Ratings Central site for good measure.
Ratings Central, as you can probably guess, is there to "... make ratings more immediate and exciting for all table tennis players, while making it as simple as possible to submit events. To accomplish this, we have developed a state-of-the-art, fully automated, online rating system." Sean O'Neill of About.com is a big fan of Ratings Central as well, and says so in the footer to his postings on the About.com site.
Hmmm ... sounds good - but what about the website? Let's have a look, shall we?
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
While this site is not of much use to me at present, which is why it doesn't rate highly, I'd really love to get this up and running in my home state of Western Australia. It's a great service, and provided the fees for non-North American organisations aren't too high, it would be great to have a up-to-date ratings system over here in Perth - and the site would then be more useful to me as well. So 1 bat at present from me, and 4 bats in the future if I can get it going locally!
I first came across this site while searching for other sites to exchange links with. It was written in Czech, but had a button to change to English, which was good. I had a quick look around, and saw the 'Add Link' button, and went through the usual site adding process. So far, so good - but then I was directed to a page written in Czech with a couple of javascript images, such as the one above. I assume this means that they are expecting a return link using these photos, but I'm not 100% sure, since there was no English version and I can't find any Czech to English translators! It also would have been nice to have been told this before submitting your own link, but maybe they are just asking for a return link instead ...
So anyway, their link is above, and as far as a review goes, this site seems to be mainly a directory of other table tennis sites split into categories such as Associations, Clubs, Results, Profiles, etc. There's not much else to say really - it seems to be just lists of other links, and what actual web pages they have are written in Czech, so I can't really comment on them either.
Overall rating:
I can't say this site is of much use to me, but seeing as they seem to expect a return link I thought it only fair to put a review up. There's nothing wrong about the site as such, it's just not very useful to me personally. If you can read Czech you may think differently.
http://www.englishtabletennis.org.uk/
Date of Review: 23rd May 2005
This is the official English Table Tennis Association website, catering for all those English players in England and abroad - there seem to be a lot of them in Western Australia these days!
This site is bigger than Ben Hur - I'm not even going to try to give a comprehensive review - it would take me hours. I'll settle for a quick highlight tour instead.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
It's got a classy design and plenty of information for the English players - but not too much of interest to those with no ties to Mother England. So it's 4 bats for English players and 2 bats for the rest of us.
http://www.geocities.com/researchguide/ttlinks.html
Date of First Review: 24th June 2005
Date of Update: 8th June 2006
This site has moved recently, so I am just updating the description.
It is still mainly a directory of links, but now the links have been split up into separate pages for convenience. They are a pretty comprehensive coverage of links for the different categories, which include:
Overall rating:
So this site remains a handy collection of links, and now organized more conveniently, which is good. Must resist the temptation to do some websurfing before I finish this rev...
http://www.insports.com.au/ttv/
Date of Review: 28th June 2005
This is the Victorian Table Tennis website, and as such it is filled with a wealth of information for the average Victorian player. But what about the rest of us?
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
I'll have to give this a grudging two and a half bats - it's a pretty good site that is frequently updated, so I'll come back every week or two to take a look. Don't want to encourage those Victorians too much though - they already think that they are great - they don't need me telling them that! ;)
http://www.wilmslowtabletennis.co.uk/
Date of Review: 28th June 2005
In my ongoing quest for links, I happened to email Andy Johnson, long serving Secretary and Match Secretary (20 years as Match Secretary!) for the Wilmslow & District Table Tennis League. Andy was not only kind enough to put up a link for me, but he also mentioned that he had done all the coding for his website by writing the HTML manually! OMG!!
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
Two bats for the Wilmslow site - although I won't have many reasons to browse the site very often, I've got to award extra credit for Andy's nice reply to my link request and his efforts in writing the HTML for his site manually.Take a bow Andy!
http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/groups/MUTTC/index.html
Date of Review: 6th July 2005
The Monash Uni site is for members of the club (or prospective members) to find out current information regarding club nights, coaching sessions, committee members etc.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
I like the site overall, and it's a good site if you are a member of the Monash Uni TTC, but it's still not all that useful to me - so 1 and a half bats only. I'd give it 3 bats if you are a Monash member though.
Melbourne University Table Tennis Club
Date of Review: 6th September 2005
Similar in intention to the Monash Uni website, the Melbourne University Table Tennis Club website is for members of the club (or prospective members) to find out current information regarding club nights, coaching sessions, committee members etc.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
As for the Monash site, the Melbourne Uni site is better if you are a member of the club, in which case I would give it 3 bats. It's still not all that useful to me - so 1 and a half bats only from my point of view (ie how useful it is to me).
Date of Review: 6th September 2005
Batskills is the website for Batskills games, which include a number of skill games and rally games which were 'introduced not only to improve skill level while having fun, but also to attract and retain players in competition with more popular sports.' Worthy goals I am sure we can all agree!
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
The overall rating for this site is a combination of the site itself, and the usefulness of the skill and rally games - I can see from my own coaching where these type of targets and goals can be very useful. A very handy site for anyone coaching who wants some extra tricks in his bag.
http://www.tabletennis.org.nz/
Date of Review: 16th September 2005
The Table Tennis New Zealand site is one I've looked at every now and again, as an Aussie who naturally wants to keep an eye on what those strange people across the Tasman are up to!
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
The Table Tennis New Zealand site has been put together well, and is graphically quite appealing too. 2 bats for me since I'm an Aussie, and 3 bats for all you Kiwis out there.
Date of Review: 8th December 2005
This is a special mention for Kay, who did such a great job of fixing up my knees and back early in 2005. One session with Kay stopped 99% of the pain I was getting after playing table tennis. So to any table tennis players in WA (or even Australia), if you are having problems with recurring pain or injuries then don't be afraid to try something a little alternative and give Kay a go. I was pretty sceptical myself but the results speak for themselves.
Thanks very much Kay!
Date of Review: 22nd March 2006
I received an email from Carlos Gaona in early March, telling me about his new table tennis website and asking me to take a look at it and see what I thought. According to Carlos - "I'm building up, with other tt guys from latinamerican and europe -and even the USA- a web community for table tennis players in spain and latinamerica -at least that is the idea for the moment."
And so, with the help of the trusty Google Translation device, I thought I'd take a quick peek.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Overall rating:
There has obviously been a fair bit of effort that has gone into this site, and for those of you who can understand the language I would think it would be a terrific site. Unfortunately for me it's difficult to get the most out of the site due to the language barrier. So it's 1 bat for me until they get an English version, and 3 bats for anyone who can read it!!