I tired it, and it's weird that it ask for an email to send the link to the report because the calculation is slow. It should be quite fast.
Moreover I got the link in my (throwaway) email in less than a minute. I think a spinning sign, or other animations should be enough.
I'm not sure if people cares about sunny/not-sunny or sunny/cloudy/rainy.
The free version has to many empty slots with [PRO]. I think it would be better if you show only the sunny/rainy days and has only one big button to upgrade to the pro version.
Anyway, I expect this to be much easier to monetize with ads. People buys a lot or other stuff for weddings, so I guess ads pays a lot. It's harder to convince people to open the wallet and pay $1 to you.
Perhaps you can add a similar site with the same backend about graduations parties of birthday parties. The interesting date interval is smaller.
Thanks Gus! Yes, I originally built it with an instant report - the issue I came across was that the API I was using sometimes took quite long to return the results. And I saw users dropping off really quick if not instantly served. So I had to go for the email route. Will see if I can optimize in the future!
Thank you for your feedback on data, very useful and I agree with you - will rethink.
And I am indeed looking for ad solutions right now as well - Google unfortunately don't monitize pages like this as their robot can't see the content - only blogs seems to work with them. So any recommendations for other ad solutions?
And agreed - I see more applications for this site - thought I'd just start with weddings to narrow it down a bit in the beginning and focus on a core group first :) Thanks again!
> And I saw users dropping off really quick if not instantly served.
What was you showing during the waiting time?
Perhaps a nice relevant animation [1] and a real or fake progress bar may keep the people in the page.
[1] A guy/gal looking at the window while it changes from rainy to sunny? Putting on and off a raincoat? Writing things in an almanac? [I'm not an expert in UI, so take my advice with a grain of salt.]
Just a loading spinner - however, it could take up to 3 min for some calls which would be too long for any user to wait. Thought about building a small in-browser game that would keep a user occupied, like catching raindrops with an umbrella or something. Love these ideas though!
Can you use GeoIP to detect the location of the user and preload the site while the user is selecting the months? Is the API to get the weather data very expensive?
My guess is that most people get marry where they live, or in some touristic/special sites that you can also guess and cache/preload.
Hm, I think most users have been quite granular when it comes to what location they are searching for and they are looking for different places from where they are situated so not sure if GeoLocation would work..
But cache & pre-loading is a good idea, will look into that!
Perhaps it's a cultural thing. [Hi from Argentina!] Here most people marry where they live because their friends are nearby, or where one of the couple members was born because half of the family is there. But my guess is that this kind of people somewhat know the local weather. For example, some days use to be very rainy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Rosa_storm (note that most of the times the storm is a few days before or after the official day).
Perhaps your users are mostly people that wants to marry in a fancy place, and they don't know the weather there. In that case, fancy places are probably more concentrated in fancy areas, and each city has it's own fad about the fanciest place in the planet.
I'm trying to find the correct article by patio11 in https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/#seo IIRC he recommended to build a custom landing page for each big holiday (because his business was somewhat holiday oriented and it was good to have a "Halloween page", a "Christmas page", ...). In your case, you can try to build a custom page for each one of the most popular places. One for the "Most rainy days in the Niagara Falls" and another for the "Most sunny days in the Niagara Falls". I'm not sure how different each page must be before Google gets mad about the cookie cutter abuse.
[Late additional comment] Do you marry usually outdoor? I've seen that in movies, but 99% of the people here marry in a buildings. A not rainy day is nice, but not as important.
Most weddings I've attended in the US were indoors, but the couple generally have photos taken outdoors (often after the ceremony but before the reception).
Thanks for checking the site out - this is my first “real” project I’ve launched after completing a coding bootcamp last year.
Wedding Rain Checker analyses years of weather data to allow couples to pick their perfect rain-free wedding date. The platform can access nearly all global weather stations, allowing users to find the perfect rain-free date for just about any place on Earth, all in a matter of minutes.
I got the idea for the site when I got engaged earlier this year. I realised I could not find any weather data for specific locations where I was considering getting married, especially comparing how many times it rained on specific dates over the last few years - which was the first thing I wanted to know before deciding on a date.
For now, this is more of a hobby project than a full-time thing. Appreciate any feedback you have, either in the comments or email me at weddingrainchecker@gmail.com.
If this is for serious use, curious as to what the scientific connection between dates and rain.
Clearly seasons affect rain, so there is that but I find it hard to believe you can pin it down to a specific Saturday, as there would be too much “chaos” to make such a prediction.
Thanks! The site is built with Next.js - but the report generation is happening on a backend node server that I'm hosting on Heroku.
For the second question, still a bit early to tell - mostly US & UK. You can see a selection of the latest requested reports at weddingrainchecker.com/latest
Moreover I got the link in my (throwaway) email in less than a minute. I think a spinning sign, or other animations should be enough.
I'm not sure if people cares about sunny/not-sunny or sunny/cloudy/rainy.
The free version has to many empty slots with [PRO]. I think it would be better if you show only the sunny/rainy days and has only one big button to upgrade to the pro version.
Anyway, I expect this to be much easier to monetize with ads. People buys a lot or other stuff for weddings, so I guess ads pays a lot. It's harder to convince people to open the wallet and pay $1 to you.
Perhaps you can add a similar site with the same backend about graduations parties of birthday parties. The interesting date interval is smaller.