With the recent acquisition of The Weather Channel by NBC, I am hoping there are some positive changes coming to Weather.com. The site, given its domain name, is the dominant website for checking the weather. Yet, the site presents a poor user experience, hides the good content and absent-mindedly focuses on unneeded services. Below I’ll highlight what bugs me the most and suggest some improvements.

Auto-detect location

Given the relative ease possibility of determining a user’s geographical location via IP address, why doesn’t the site auto-detect your location and show your city’s weather on the homepage? Why make the user enter their city/ZIP code to get the information they want? I’m tired of repeatedly having to enter 30308 to get Atlanta’s weather. Yes, I could use their tiny, poorly-located “Save Location” button to cookie my city, but as I travel, I’d rather have the site immediately display the weather in my current location.

Distractions

It seems Weather.com has lost its mission and its understanding of what most people are looking for when visiting a weather site. They’ve put too much emphasis on peripheral services and promos, like golf/skiing guides and travel services, and made it hard for us to get what we really want: current weather, hour-by-hour and 10 day forecasts, and satellite and radar maps. Instead, they’ve buried the good content among a pile of useless services, promotions and advertisements.

It seems Weather.com is still playing the pageview game, even though advertisers and traffic measurers have given up on it. Weather.com is hiding their content in order to boost ad impressions, thereby increasing revenues. This tactic has probably worked for some time and may continue to work simply because they own the weather.com domain. Yet, their missteps may soon lead to a bolt for newer, better weather services (see Other weather sites below).

They’ve even gone so far as to hold back some good content and services behind a paywall, clearly showing an ignorance of the movement to free content. NYTimes is now free as are many others, with the WSJ being one of the last holdouts. In this age of free information, I find it astonishing that Weather.com would require me to pay to get basic weather information and services. Gold, Weather.com’s subscription service, allows you to customize the page, access up to 11 cities weather at the same time, and access the larger interactive radar/satellite map. Would you pay $25 for this?

Design and layout

The site’s design is in dire need of a face-lift. Not only is the design lacking, but it’s cluttered with ads. In fact, nearly half the page is either an ad or a promotion for Weather.com or a partner. (Click for a larger image; green=ad or promo; red=content I don’t want)

Instead of throwing all these ads at the user, why not charge a higher CPM by presenting only one 300×250 ad and then give the user the content they want right up front? Yes, revenues may initially fall by reducing the number of ad placements, but I strongly believe that by creating a better user experience, traffic and revenues would eventually increase as users that Weather.com drove away return to the site.

The one good thing

Yes, I had to find one good thing. Weather.com recently upgraded their radar map widget to be much more interactive, ala Google Maps. It’s a pretty neat flash widget, but they’ve limited it’s size (500px wide) and don’t allow you to embed it on your blog or website. To get a larger map you have to pay for the Gold subscription.

Other weather sites

Savvy web users found better weather sites long ago (I use SimpleWeather) and I suspect average users are beginning to as well. If NBC doesn’t whip the site into shape, it might not be long before Weather.com is overtaken by a crafty upstart. What do you use to get your weather data?