About … Dragon Boat Net (read below) — About … What is a Dragon Boat?
Dragon Boat Net, created in mid 2006 by Henning Wiekhorst’s Creative Dragon Works, arose after publishing the book “Hong Kong – Mother of Dragons”. It was a time with the internet becoming more and more popular and the flood of webpages coming up, all still programmed in HTML For sure, nobody was yet talking about tablets or smart-phones. No, a mobile phone still was, what the name says – a phone! – And the latest very fancy technology enabled people to send SMS. YouTube was already around, but things like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp or the like, nobody talked about. Also most dragon boat clubs or teams could not effort an own website.
When www.dragonboatnet.com went online, it offered several services to the dragon boat community.
Dragon Boat Net first of all had a huge gallery of photos from all the races in Hong Kong and likely every participating team was able to find some nice pictures of themselves. It was okay for everybody to download the photos under the only condition of showing the credits to Dragon Boat Net. At the end there were about 35.000 photographs to see.
In its “Cinema section” showed all the Creative Dragon Works videos.
At the time a very unique and exclusive feature was the Race Calendar of Dragon Boat Net. It allowed everybody via an online-input-form to enter events and races, so that paddlers can look up when and where races take place in which country and how to contact the organizer.
Teams not having an own website were offered to have their webspace on Dragon Boat Net for free.
With its “Insight section” a lot information about the sport, its tradition or about training was – and still is – provided.
Dragon Boat Net offered, in times before social media being around, a world-wide dragon boat forum.
This is the original header-picture and text describing Dragon Boat Net when it startet:
Dragon Boat Net – The Paddlers Site is the biggest website in things Dragon Boat ! Beside the dragon boat also others like i.e. the Outrigger Canoe are covered. Dragon Boat Net links the worldwide dragon boat family. It provides Dragon Boat News and Reports, Insights to the Dragon Boat Sport, Dragon Boat Photo Galleries and great Dragon Boat Videos, a Dragon Boat Forum and even offers free Blogs and Websites to the Dragon Boat Community, which you can have in The Paddle Space.
It always was, is and will stay an independant website, although later there was a very close co-operation with the IDBF for quite some years. However, the financing was done by selling related advertisements. Dragon Boat Net certainly was an important website for dragon boating world-wide. Perhaps it was evem the biggest site online with about 30.000 visitors each month back in the years from 2008 to 2011. But then as a result of the world-wide financial crisis, with incoming money falling short, Dragon Boat Net well stayed online, but was not maintained for a period of seven years.
In early 2018 Dragon Boat Net was re-launched and soon gained growing popularity again – until the entire sport had to shut down due to the Corona-Pandemic. Taking the chance by end 2021 to modernize the website, the aim for the future is to keep archived reports, articles and information about dragon boating available, as well as – of course! – publishing actual news and hopefully helping to further promote the wonderful sport of dragon boating. The Race-Calendar will also be maintained!
With the hope to provide you an interesting and useful website, best wishes and a “Paddles Up” are sent to you by
Henning Wiekhorst
You are invited to also visit
