I found some time over Christmas for a much needed update of the OOAK table tennis Shop website. Some re-organisation to reduce clutter and excess information was well overdue, as well as some focus on what the shop specialises in.

OOAK Shop has tons of information and articles on table tennis equipment, but if people don’t see it, it wasted. I also wanted to make the site more secure, by running it under https, and wanted to add some speed enhancement, which would be particularly beneficial for those that browse on a phone or tablet.

So the following changes were made, hope you find them beneficial:

 

Speed:

The site was optimised for speed, for both PC and tablets. I think this is important as about 40% of current traffic comes from tablets/phones.

I think the shop website would have to be one of the fastest loading sites anywhere now, which should benefit everyone!

 

 

Security:

The site has been upgraded to run fully on https, whereas before it was only running https for secure areas. This is supposed to improve security with the bonus of also running a little faster.

Now you no longer get warning that the site may not be fully secure… something that browsers have started displaying in recent times.

 

 

Organisation:

Sometimes we need to re-think what special things a shop actually offers and where your expertise lies. If you offer something unique and special, it’s worth highlighting, so if this is important to a customer, they’ll know you’ve come to  the right place.

AT OOAK TT Shop we have more expertise in table tennis rubbers and blades than most others. Very few shops would do their own testing, and design their own rubber and blade combination. So I think where our specialty lies is in custom table tennis bats, as well as the less common table tennis rubbers, particularly pimple rubbers and antispin.
So with this in mind, I re-organised the menus and also the related article to make this information easier to find. I added some brief explanations to the different categories, for the benefit of people that don’t know much about table tennis equipment. I also removed a lot of clutter and links, to make things easier to find and read.

 

Table tennis blog:

I added a table tennis shop blog. Why you ask… you’re already running a table tennis forum, this reviews blog? True, but on both these sites I make a great effort to be independent and unbiased, and don’t feel right about writing about a new item in the shop that I find interesting, because it will feel like a marketing exercise…. that just no me.

For the shop blog I can write anything related to shop items, and if that’s what people are interested in, they can read it. If they’re looking for independent reviews or articles, they can check out the other sites.

 

What else?

There is still more I’d like to do, e.g. filters to search for items of specific properties, like all the rubbers that come in 1.0mm, or all 7-ply blades. That’s not an easy thing to implement, so I have not got around to it yet… but will add it when I get a chance.

 

If you’ve got any comments or suggestions for the site, something that you like, or would find useful, I’d love to hear them.