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Improvement Recommendations for the WTA website manager

14K views 183 replies 62 participants last post by  Hanan Ubis 
#1 · (Edited)
For years, I've told tennis-loving friends that there's a sort of swishy misogyny amongst the extremely wealthy men who control the sport behind the scenes. With some very rare exceptions like Evert- or Serena-types, they don't truly respect the female players. For them, the WTA is basically a prostitution/escort service for their elitist pals or, secondarily, the ATP, and it's an organization where pretty gals can do photo-ops to promote the sport to male viewers with only casual interest in tennis.

How else do you explain why, for years, the WTA site has been just a cheesy-ass knock-knock joke when compared with the sites for the NFL, NBA, MLB...pretty much ANY other pro sport. You would THINK that the objective would be to draw attention to up-and-coming, highly-talented players to promote the sport. Instead, we get THIS for Wimbledon quarterfinalist Muchova's "bio":
https://www.wtatennis.com/players/player/322191/title/Karolina-MUCHOVA#bio

A lot of effort went into that, huh?Great photo, too:rolleyes:.....And that's not some isolated example but rather par for the course with the WTA site. In Mexico, we have major problems with nepotism, but common sense tells you that--if you have a shamefully-lazy unemployed nephew who dropped out of high school and can't last even an hour without masturbating--you give him a routine job, like sweeping and mopping the warehouse, so that he can have a little spending money for groceries. You DON'T appoint him as city chief of police or even let him serve as the website manager for a big-time sport:rolleyes:

EDIT: At least one person at the WTA appears to have read many of the posters' complaints and taken corrective action, and that's why the thread title has been changed a bit.
 
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#4 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

It's a mess. I hardly ever look at it now. Another thing that annoys me is they have the GS performance by year on the RH side of the payer profile but the most recent matches are at the sop and it goes back in time as you scroll down. Surely it's more logical to start at the earliest date and as youscroll down you get the performance at the most recent slams.
 
#5 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

The reason why that happens (a profile without a picture) is extremely dumb and is not really anyone's fault, not those that run the website anyway.

So get ready to be blown away... Muchova doesn't have a profile picture because... drum roll... she didn't attend Indian Wells this year, which is when the 2019 photoshoot for the player's profile pictures took place. Gauff didn't have one either in the middle of Wimbledon, but they threw one together, probably from her social media (see for yourself: https://www.wtatennis.com/players/player/328560/title/cori-gauff ). I guess, despite making it to a Grand Slam quarterfinal, because Muchova is a Czech player, the powers that be didn't deem it necessary for now.

Actually I'm not going to try and defend them, if they found a way for Coco, they should have fixed Muchova too, this is just dumb and inexcusable at this level. So yes, I agree, these people are very bad at their job.
 
#10 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

The reason why that happens (a profile without a picture) is extremely dumb and is not really anyone's fault, not those that run the website anyway.

So get ready to be blown away... Muchova doesn't have a profile picture because... drum roll... she didn't attend Indian Wells this year, which is when the 2019 photoshoot for the player's profile pictures took place.

Actually I'm not going to try and defend them, if they found a way for Coco, they should have fixed Muchova too, this is just dumb and inexcusable at this level. So yes, I agree, these people are very bad at their job.
Thank you for that information:hatoff:. I had no idea that was the procedure yet had no doubt their M.O. was something asininely stupid:rolleyes:--and you just confirmed that.

Again, if FIFA, NASCAR, FIBA, the NBA or NFL had a website like that, the fans would respond with a mixture of outrage and laughing mockery, thereby forcing the commissioner to intervene and make wholesale changes. Sadly, the peons who OUTwardly run tennis just don't respect the women enough to take simple, common-sense steps to fix things, and the wealthy sicko elitist investors who TRULY run the sport only see the female players as potential conquests:help:
 
#11 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

updating player profile should be done every week. We live in a dynamic world today. There is no excuse for things like this.
It's incredible how backwards some of their stuff is designed. We live in a world where you can have gigantic databases updated automatically daily and these clowns can't even put a damn profile picture to one of the Wimbledon last 8. Also did I mention the player pages suck and are update either wrong, late or not at all? I was looking at Vika's page a few days ago, researching something, and she was missing entire tournaments from her current calendar year, and her win/lose wasn't updated either.

You know it's bad when you have to go somewhere else to research stats about a player, or really do as little as check the score to a match in real time.

They can't NOT know this is an issue, right? They must be working on a proper redesign and that's why things are so shitty right now, because they're focusing on that redesign, right? This can't seriously be it...
 
#7 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

The WTA website is truly amateur.

Can’t find anything, and the articles feel like give are written by hack bloggers pretending to be journalists.

Horrible everything.
 
#8 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

It is truly embarrassing. At present you can’t search year end rankings and players results are all over the place.
 
#14 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

Bring back the old WTA website
:lol:

Well we all thought the old WTA website was a bit shit too.. But this new montrosity really put things into perspective.:hysteric: We didn't realise how good we had it... It wasn't perfeect but it was readable. I did actually use to look at the old website regularly.
 
#21 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

Ok if the WTA doesn't care about the tour and results, the players don't care about the tour and results (they don't even know who is top 5 half the time), how do they expect the fans to get onboard
This.

It's not only about the website,if anybody linked to WTA is lurking you're website is a disgrace.:wavey:

Worst, even the marketing is managed by people who doesn't know anything about their product and worst they don't care.:eek:

The ATP is trying so hard to build a next gen since years without players and at the same moment on the tour youngster are winning big and I pretty sure if you not related and following the tour you don't know them.

It should have been years now that they should replaced Zhuhai by a "next gen tournament" if you take this year U20 race the top 20 are:

Vondrousova,Andreescu,Anisimova,Yastremska,Swiatek,Rybakina,Potapova,Juvan,Gauff,Osuigwe,McNally,Zavatska,Xiyu Wang,Kostyuk,Gracheva,Ann Li,Aiava,Liang en Shuo,Shuyue,Wang Xinyu(+Lopatetska,Zhuk).

How can't you do anything relevant to market that .:SNE:
 
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#18 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!



they designed it to look more like these other sports sites but they only got halfway.

Aesthetically, I don't find it as horrid as some others do, but I definitely don't think it's easy to navigate. I use other sites like coric and wikipedia over this.

I think the site if it had some other non-tennis function like tabloids or random topical online magazine, it might be okay, but for tennis, looking up stats, players, histories, news... it's not good.
 
#19 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

Their website is a DISASTER. The last time it was decent was around 2005. What also drives me crazy is that in the ATP/WTA live app, the WTA doesn't bother to upload or update draws for the tournaments at least half the time. The ATP tournaments are always up to date, but for WTA they often don't post the draws for several hours or sometimes even days after it has been released, and then usually totally stop updating once the tournament starts. That is where I want to go to find the draws each week, but it usually ends up being easier to find them here :help:.
 
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#23 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

Their website is a DISASTER. The last time it was decent was around 2005. What also drives me crazy is that in the ATP/WTA live app, the WTA doesn't bother to upload or update draws for the tournaments at least half the time. The ATP tournaments are always up to date, but for WTA they often don't post the draws for several hours or sometimes even days after it has been released, and then usually totally stop updating once the tournament starts. That is where I want to go to find the draws each week, but it usually ends up being easier to find them here :help:.
Yes. It was really good and easy to navigate.
It has been downhill since. Everytime it changes you think it can't get any worse, but they still find a way.
 
#30 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

I think they need to treat the WTA site like a women's tennis magazine with some juicy articles about what's going on off court, updates about their personal life, in-depth analysis of top players game repeatedly and seasonally of specialists like grass courters and clay courters, invested profiles of upcoming players, information on ticket availability and prices, how-to-manual about what talented young girls could be lured into the sport and how info about what parents, community and associations could do to help the growth. Interactive fan+player sessions and a whole lot more.
 
#32 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

It has nothing to do with respect towards players. WTA site and organization as a whole is just copying the rules and ideas of ATP, to the extent it cares. There's very little creativity going on here. Allowing on-court couching is the only different idea that comes in mind.
 
#33 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

The best thing is never to visit the site. There is no information there you can't get anywhere else. (LIVE Ranking, H2H, Tournament draws ... )
At least that's what I have done the past 2 years.
 
#35 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

The best thing is never to visit the site.
At least that's what I have done the past 2 years.
Your approach is very logical. My personal stance is, If we can find a fairly simple, direct way to influence/persuade(even badger) the WTA into making a better effort then why not try it?

We, the fans, deserve it since pretty much every other sports league's site is a NON-clusterfuck(that is, the opposite of the WTA's); the players deserve a WAYYYY better site to represent their training and on-court commitment; and, finally, it's healthier for the sport itself. A sport only grows a lot by bringing in casual fans who hadn't ardently followed it before. When such individuals visit the WTA site for the first time, they're reaction is going to be, "WTF is going on with this *******, mom-and-pop, shit-for-brains outfit....and why should I waste my time with these assclowns:(!"

This is why I speculate that the WTA brass is insulated from all of this and don't realize just how atrocious the site is. The other possibilities are: They're extremely stupid OR they're raking in loads of black-market income behind close doors and, thus, they don't care much about the on-court product:eek:
 
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#34 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

The ITF website is better in a lot of ways. I usually use it and flashscore to research for games on here.
 
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#36 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

How does the WTA handle streaming in the US? Can I get all the matches from Slams and the regular tour with Tennis Channel Plus even if there is a delay for the stuff on Tennis Channel? I feel like streaming is by far the biggest fail of the WTA online presence.
 
#37 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

lol, Tennis Channel? I call it obsolete tennis channel. I dropped it from my cable package because it was too frustrating. Not only they show few women's tournaments, but they love to show century old matches, while we have LIVE tournaments going on.
 
#38 ·
Re: Indeed, ANYBODY could be a WTA website manager!!!

Some 6-8 years ago the WTA website was not inferior to the ATP's, by any means. Now it reminds of some gloomy joke. I can hardly find another example of a web service that would be so unserviceable. And I can't imagine the reasons for this disastrous decline.
 
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