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steven


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Revamped ITF site
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The ITF site is undergoing a revamp, which can be seen at http://beta.itftennis.com/procircuit/home.aspx

I was having a look at it yesterday evening and it hasa better look than the old site (which usually rings lots of warning bells about ease of use, but in fact it seems to run at about the same speed as the original site) and there are some excellent new features. However, I quickly noticed a couple of things that would make it much harder to use for my (which probably also means 'our') purposes and which I am intending to write to them about, hopefully before it is too late.

I know I'm not the only heavy user of the ITF site here, so if any of you want to have a quick look yourselves, please could you let me know if there is anything else you think I should bring to their attention.

The first of the two immediate problems I noticed were:

On the entry lists (see e.g. http://beta.itftennis.com/procircuit/tournaments/men's-tournament/info.aspx?tournamentid=1100026083), they are now using flags instead of country codes, which looks nicer but would stop it being possible to do a quick Ctrl-F search for "GBR" when checking for Brits on the lists. That would be easy to fix by keeping the flags but also showing the country codes.

The same is true on the Drawsheet tab (see http://beta.itftennis.com/procircuit/tournaments/men's-tournament/info.aspx?tournamentid=1100026083), which is otherwise greatly improved, but it's not quite so important there, given that the country codes do still show up on Results tab.

The second problem is on the player activity tab- see e.g. http://beta.itftennis.com/ProCircuit/players/player/profile.aspx?PlayerID=100034585 as an example of a player who has played a lot of both singles and doubles recently and click on the Activity tab.

What I don't like here is the way they have mixed in singles and doubles results, since it makes it easier to make mistakes when checking singles winning or losing streaks. It also makes it impossible to enumerate Brit-bashing, Brit-bashed, Muzz GEM-bashing (etc) streaks by doing a repeated Ctrl-F search and simply counting.

Btw it also looks at first sight like you cannot go back more than a year any more because there is nowhere to put in a date range, but in fact there is a "View All" button at the bottom, which shows the player's full activity (without the 10-year limit that could sometimes be a bit of a pain), so overall I think that bit has improved.



-- Edited by steven on Tuesday 21st of February 2012 05:17:41 PM

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GB on a shirt, Davis Cup still gleaming, 79 years of hurt, never stopped us dreaming ... 29/11/2015 that dream came true!

GB top 25s (ranks, whereabouts) & stats - http://www.britishtennis.net/stats.html
steven


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I'm not sure how long the beta version was up for (I only came across it last night when someone pointed it out) but I see they have gone live with the new site this afternoon, in the sense that it is no longer possible to access the old pages (even though mostof the new pages still have "beta" in the URL)

One immediate effect of that is that all of the ITF links on the GB top 25 tables (links to the ITF profiles for each player and some of the women's draw links) have stopped working (the new ITF Pro Circuits home page appears instead if you click on any of them) - that can be sorted out going forwards, though I probably won't bother until the new pages have gone off being 'beta' pages, but it means all the historical links won't work any more.

The ATP. WTA and TennisEurope sites have all been guilty of the same thing when they revamped (though I must admit, I did expect better of the ITF) - I know plenty of sites (including a couple I have run myself) that have ensured that if an incoming link goes to a page whose URL has changed, it automatically gets diverted to the equivalent new URL (it's not very hard to do), so I'm not sure why the main tennis sites can't manage to do the same.

They have given me an email address to write to though, so if anyone else has any comments or wants to write to them, it looks like there may still be time.



-- Edited by steven on Tuesday 21st of February 2012 06:10:30 PM

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GB on a shirt, Davis Cup still gleaming, 79 years of hurt, never stopped us dreaming ... 29/11/2015 that dream came true!

GB top 25s (ranks, whereabouts) & stats - http://www.britishtennis.net/stats.html
seagull


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On a similar subject what the heck has happened to Steve G site? Guy who has taken it over is trying to make it like Facebook I think and I can't post entry lists there anymore :(

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steven


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seagull wrote:

On a similar subject what the heck has happened to Steve G site? Guy who has taken it over is trying to make it like Facebook I think and I can't post entry lists there anymore :(

Yes, they seem to have missed the point about what made stevegtennis so good in the first place (lots of info, easy to access, no fluff ...)



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GB on a shirt, Davis Cup still gleaming, 79 years of hurt, never stopped us dreaming ... 29/11/2015 that dream came true!

GB top 25s (ranks, whereabouts) & stats - http://www.britishtennis.net/stats.html
Madeline


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Is that why I can't get onto the entry lists forum on steveg! I know they are posted on MTF, but they were just a bit easier to find on steveg.

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Maza1987


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and they have removed the "height" column for players.


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SMC1809


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Steven, you'll be pleased to know that the ITF site now includes the country codes as well as the flags. Nice to know that they're listening and responding fairly quickly to your suggestion.



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steven


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SMC1809 wrote:

Steven, you'll be pleased to know that the ITF site now includes the country codes as well as the flags. Nice to know that they're listening and responding fairly quickly to your suggestion.

Ah, good news. smile Now if they could sort out how slow the new site is (it didn't seem too bad initially, so hopefully it will get better again), add back all the other missing info, decouple the singles and doubles activity again, start updating the rankings and activity pages as quickly as before (no doubt this has been slowed down by work on the new site, so hopefully that will get back to normal again soon too), make the old links divert automatically, etc, etc ... !

Anyway, I doubt many other official-type sites would have listened at all, so all credit to them for that smile



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GB on a shirt, Davis Cup still gleaming, 79 years of hurt, never stopped us dreaming ... 29/11/2015 that dream came true!

GB top 25s (ranks, whereabouts) & stats - http://www.britishtennis.net/stats.html
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