Web Site Review #2a

Benjamin Melançon

Weather Underground (wunderground.com)

Topic, Purpose & Source

The site is about weather and it exists to tell people about the current weather, wherever in the world the wheather of interest is.  The other purpose of the site is to make money.  It is a Commercial site: its source is a company that expects to turn a profit giving users weather information while while selling advertising, targeted and untargeted, to other companies.

Target Audience

Clearly, its target audience is people who want weather information.  Although they give the demographic characteristics of their visitors to potential advertisers and advertise the targeting of advertisements to potential advertisers, it seems unlikely that Weather Underground would seek a particular type of person among the target audience of people who want to know what the weather is.

Content

What this page has to be judged against in terms of the information it provides is pretty clear.  Does it tell people what the weather is at the moment and will most likely be up to, say, a week from now?  It should also, of course, give the user choices of place.  All this is supplied.  Still, the content provided is only adequate, in my estimation.  I'm not exactly sure what in-depth weather information would be like, but it probably involves more than "Partly sunny. High around 70. West Wind 10 to 15 mph." for the next day's forecast.

Site Plan & Navigation

The strategy employed by Wunderground.com for site navigation is to have pretty much all links to all part of the site displayed on every screen.  That is, there is a built-in "frame" that contains essentially the same navigational information on each page.  And although there are many parts of the site, they got away with it, at the cost of navigation taking up between a third and a half of the screen space.  It actually tends to overlap, with some of the same navigation aids (for example, for the temperature and other kinds of maps shown on the main page) appearing in the navigation sidebar and the "content" part of the page.

The content most people are most likely to be needing, the forcast "for any City, State or ZIP Code, or Country" is provided through a link at the very top of the page (every page).  The only danger is that people may overlook it, as it is above an ad and the rest of the navigation links are down the left-hand side of the page.  This risk is probably small, and in short the site makes it easy to go to all important parts with one click.

Links

As far as I can tell, the only links that take users to a different site are those that go to advertisers.  One link to the source of their weather information would be reasonable, if only to indicate that they are not making it up.

They also have a search engine link that uses an independent, and un-weather-related, search engine to provide results inside Weather Underground's page (and with their ads).

Page Design

Each page fills up just about all the screen real estate.  The screen does not adjust, really, to anything much less wide than a browser window on an 800 pixel screen.  It's ability to expand to fill a wider screen also seem limited, but it does have a little bit of play.

The advertisements are very prominently placed.  They are the standard banner ad and rather than being at the very top of each page they lead off what would be the "content" area.  There are a larger number of ads ("Sponsors") toward the bottom of the site, but they are of course not as intrusive as the banner ads.

A big square of white dominates the local forecast page.  This is the straw that broke the camels back: with it, the ad, and the navigation at the top of the screen the local conditions and forecast do not even make it unto my 600 pixel tall screen without scrolling.

A good deal of space is devoted to links to other aspects of the site and a substantial part to advertisements, leaving perhaps a third or somewhat more of the space on any given page as content.  The ratio is too low, but the content is not truly buried; it is viewable.  Chiefly, the advertising and navigational parts cause using the site to require more scrolling.  Another bad thing about the amount of the page devoted to navigation is that a significant part of this is for about the site links and a search engine link, none of which is related to the reasons people would visit a weather site.

Creativity

Functionality

This site's URL is apparently officially www.wunderground.com, but www.weatherunderground.com works just as well which is important given the fact that the name of the site is "Weather Underground."

A prominently placed link — under the headline "New!" on the left of the page — provided not quite enough information to know exactly what it was, but in any case it led to a relentlessly black "sattelite map."  Bell, whistle, or an integral part of the site, this section did not work.  Uh, scratch that, sort of, it worked later in the same day.

The page crashes NCSA Mosaic and is unusable in Lynx, in which the content part of the site can never be reached for some reason.

Unique Features

At the bottom of the local forecast it gave the moon phase, which was a neat surprise.  Unfortunately, it gave it as a graphic which gives no more information than one can get by looking at the moon.  It does not tell an astronomical dolt such as myself whether the moon is getting bigger or smaller, or if it's really full or just very close.  It did give moonrise and moonset times along with sunrise and sunset times, which I thought was cool.

Another unique feature was a weather forecast graph.  Although very simple, it let me look at weather data in a way I had never been able to before: rather than just high and low temperatures for a day or night, it showed the expected temperature of every three hours as a line graph, giving one a better sense of what the temperature will really be and also showing its pattern of fluctuation throughout the day.  The graphs also charted the projected dewpoint and wind velocity.

Other unique features were a dropdown list that (incompletely) changed the text of the page to nearly any language and a "Print this page" button that removed all non-content data for easier printing.

E-mail: melancon@student.umass.edu

©2000 September 17 · beMWeb