
Weather Underground redesign - qcassidy
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/WunderPress/?entrynum=12
======
j053003
Out of all the weather sites, I still prefer the layout of the National
Weather Service's forecast pages.

Example:
[http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=41.893077299131...](http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=41.89307729913167&lon=-87.681884765625&site=lot&smap=1&unit=0&lg=en&FcstType=text)

~~~
trop
NWS -- according to rumor -- deliberately keeps their pages nerdy and
undesigned due to pressure from commercial providers (AccuWeather, etc.),
which don't want a government-supported a "rival".
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties_Act_of_2005))
Forget that the government rival was there first. It's been awkward to get
XML-ish data feeds from NWS, because private industry is trying to make money
selling the same data which is freely available from NWS.

The private weather services don't provide much value. Most of the local
current conditions data (METAR) is gov't sponsored, not to mention the
satellite imagery. The government forecast algorithms are just great -- the
gov't has a mandate to do this & does it well. It does make sense to go to a
private provider if you have an oil rigs, agribusiness, etc. which needs
tailored weather advisories.

The only place for good local weather which isn't cribbing or catching up with
NWS is local meteorologists in difficult to judge regions. For example in the
hill country of northern Vermont, the Eye on the Sky forecasters will call the
weather valley by valley, a luxury which NWS computers won't give.

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baddox
The redesign is visually pleasing, but it's no longer usable. I now have to
scroll down to see the 5-day forecast. I switched my bookmark over to
<http://www.wund.com>, the lite version.

~~~
blahedo
On the main page, I thought it was nifty that it autodetected my location and
gave the current weather, but then I couldn't find any link to actually find
the forecast!

Then I thought to click on the name of the town. That gave me a page of which
less than 1/3 was actual content (until I scrolled down). This seems like
exceedingly poor design. Although, the actual "Forecast" div is reasonably
compact, so there might be some URL hack you can do to jump straight to that.

It's too bad; I was a wunderground user for years until they did a site
upgrade that kept causing browser crashes; I've been on weather.com for quite
a while now, and this upgrade doesn't look good enough to entice me back.

~~~
billswift
I prefer Weather Underground, because their predictions are a bit more
pessimistic than weather.com's, I would rather be prepared for a snow or rain
that didn't happen than be caught unprepared by one that did.

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jonprins
Is it just me, or is their choice of name a terrible branding decision?

It's bothered me for quite a while. I'm surprised they haven't been lampooned
on Fox News as being a terrorist weather outlet.

~~~
adolph
Wikipedia (I'm not certain if this is for real or not): _Based in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, it was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of
Michigan's Internet weather database. The name is a reference to the 1960s
militant radical terrorist student group the Weather Underground, which also
originated at the University of Michigan._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(weather_se...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_\(weather_service\))

~~~
uvdiv
<http://www.wunderground.com/about/background.asp>

> _The growing Internet weather program was given the name Weather
> Underground, a reference to the 1960's radical group that also originated at
> the University of Michigan, which had taken its name from the lyrics to Bob
> Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, "You don't need a weather man to know
> which way the wind blows."_

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rhizome
I'm feeling a whitespace backlash building within me. Perhaps as a natural
evolution to "below the fold" making its way into web design, I'm starting to
think poorly of websites that place their content low in the viewport. WU's
redesign puts the top of the content about halfway down the viewport, but the
entire header, including the nav tabs, could be half as tall if they tried; I
doubt anybody is typing sentences into their massive search box.

~~~
adolph
Yeah, the level of WU branding and website administrative stuff at the top
even after the first visit is annoying.

Hopefully they will keep working on it. Their mobile webapp is very good at
not wasting my time.

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mrpollo
forget the redesign, give us an api that works!

[http://api.wunderground.com/auto/wui/geo/ForecastXML/index.x...](http://api.wunderground.com/auto/wui/geo/ForecastXML/index.xml?query=Chicago,IL)

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hollerith
Slow to load here. I waited 5 sec and gave up. Slowness is unlikely to be at
my end because google loads as fast as ever.

~~~
billswift
I'm on dialup, so the difference is even more noticeable to me. The new page
takes more than half again as long to load as the earlier version, and it was
already pretty slow (too many ads and images).

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andresmh
I spent 1 minute trying to figure out how to set the units to metric system
and I failed. This should be easier.

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huertanix
That logo...

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lhnn
Don't like that Wunderground turned into an unusable Weather Channel knockoff?

<http://classic.wunderground.com> (Classic)

<http://wund.com> (Lite)

<http://m.wund.com> (Super lite, aka Mobile) (Loads REALLY quickly)

