About this site
This is an unofficial redesign, built by a student as a university studio exercise. It is not affiliated with Canberra Go Club, nobody at the club asked for it, and the club has not reviewed it. Every fact about the club on this site was taken from the club's own page and nothing was added to it.
The club's real site is canberra.go.org.au. If anything here contradicts it, believe theirs and not mine.
Why this club
I should be straight about one thing first: I have never been. Everything on this site about the club came from the club's own page, not from a Saturday afternoon in Civic.
I played Go as a child and then let it go for years. On 30 July 2026, Ke Jie won the Chinese "King of Kings" championship, beating four world champions without dropping a single game, and I found myself watching Go again for the first time in a long while. So I did the obvious next thing and searched for a Go club in Canberra. I found this one.
And I still could not work out whether I should turn up on Saturday.
That is not a complaint about the club, and it is worth being precise about why. Everything a newcomer needs is already on that page: Saturday from noon, King O'Malley's in Civic, beginners most definitely welcome, boards available if you don't have one, and members happy to teach at any skill level. The facts are all there, and the tone is warmer than most club sites manage — just not in the order a stranger reads them in.
So this redesign has an unusually specific premise: I am the reader that page failed. Not a designer with opinions about somebody else's website — the actual person who went looking for a game, found the club, and came away without an answer.
What made me pick this club rather than give up is what those facts say about it. You do not have to own a board. Members will teach you whatever your level. That is a generous thing to keep offering, week after week, and it is the reason this site exists at all. The redesign adds nothing to that offer — it only rearranges how it is read.
What the original gets right
It would be dishonest to redesign a page and imply it was bad. It is not — most of what it does, it does correctly.
- Nothing a visitor needs is missing. The day and time, the venue, what to bring, parking and transport, and two ways to reach a person are all there. Plenty of club sites cannot say that.
- The meeting time is the one thing emphasised, and it comes first. Of everything on the page, that is the right choice to lead with.
- The email address is deliberately obscured rather than made a clickable link. That protects a volunteer's inbox from scrapers, and I kept it exactly as they wrote it rather than quietly undoing their decision.
- It is one small, fast page that links out to the venue's own site.
What it makes hard
My objections are about structure, not accuracy.
- Everything lives in one flat list. Six items mix when and where with what to bring, the venue's amenities, and contact details. A stranger who wants only "is it on this Saturday, and where" has to read all of it to find the two items they came for.
- One heading, no navigation. With no structure there is nowhere to put anything that is not a bullet point — no room to explain what the game actually is, and no way to separate what the club is from what a newcomer needs to know.
- The location map is at the very bottom, several items below the venue line it illustrates, so the address and its picture are read far apart.
What I did instead
- The home page answers one question and stops: should I go this Saturday.
- The practical detail — parking, transport, what is at the venue — moved to its own page, reachable but out of the way.
- An introduction to the game, which the original has no room for. It is my writing rather than the club's, so it carries a byline saying exactly that.