Top 100 Golf Courses is 10 years old
Top 100 Golf Courses of the World is 10 years old
Top 100 celebrates its 10th birthday in 2014
July 2014
How time flies. It seems like only yesterday when we nervously launched the (www.top100golfcourses.com) website with a modest number of web pages and rather basic functionality, enabling passionate golfers like ourselves to review many of the top golf courses in Great Britain & Ireland.
It wasn’t long before we expanded our horizons to feature the top courses in the World and so, ten years later, even though we’re still using some of the original design, a lot of other things have changed, such as implementing a number of improved navigation tools and incorporating Google Maps to find exact course locations.
Somewhat miraculously, all members of the original UK-based team are still around – each of us with a few more grey hairs as well as the odd wrinkle – and our complement of worldwide correspondents continues to grow, ensuring that we remain the most informed golf course ranking authority in the business.
There’s no doubt that Top 100 has developed exponentially in terms of its content and activity – for instance, in 2013, more than 1.5 million golfers from 228 different countries browsed 5,000+ live web pages on the website, viewing an incredible 7.2 million pages.
Over the decade, we’ve established Top 100 rankings for eleven different countries/continents around the world and most of these territories – along with seven other nations – are further subdivided by state/province/county/district to provide rankings for more specific geographical regions.
It’s sometimes hard to believe that a venture which started out as a hobby has somehow developed into a business, thanks in no small part to the support of our various partners and advertisers, including Mediadrive, Golfbreaks.com, Galvin Green and many others.
To celebrate our ten years online, we decided last month to throw a little party at Wentworth, inviting everybody on the team to the European PGA Headquarters in Surrey to enjoy some top class golf and have some fun at one of the UK’s most famous facilities.
The first course that we played at this prestigious 54-hole venue was the East, which many in our party felt lived up to its pre-round billing as the most intimate, charming and player-friendly layout on the property. And playing it on a day when the sun was splitting the sky just added to the wonderful golf experience.
It was out again in the afternoon to take on the famed West course, scene of Rory McIlroy’s triumph in the 2014 BMW PGA Championship a couple of weeks earlier. Extensively renovated five years ago, “Burma Road” came in for a fair amount of criticism after it reopened but, even with one or two small reservations, the testing new layout met the overall approval of the Top 100 team.
After a late evening meal in the clubhouse and (for some) an even later night in the bar before retiring upstairs, the team reassembled after breakfast to take on the very underrated Edinburgh course, an unsung gem of an 18-holer that fully deserves its place in our Top 100 English rankings. Alas – all too quickly – our visit to one of the world’s finest 54-hole destinations had come to an end.
And so, on reflection, what does the future hold now for the Top 100 website? Why not let us know what YOU think – where have we got things right, what can we do better and what would you like us to do (within reason, of course) to enhance your browsing experience?
Feel free to send an email to info@top100golfcourses.com with your constructive criticism and we’ll see what we can do to resolve any issues.
In the meantime... here’s looking forward to the next ten years!
The Top 100 Team
A few photographs from the gathering at Wentworth:
