Web Site Review #2b

Benjamin Melançon

Weather.gov

Topic

The site of the Interactive Weather Information Network is about current weather data and forecasts, particularly for the United States.

Purpose

Weather.gov provides this data as a public service.

Source

This is a Government site.  Specifically, the U.S. National Weather Service is the source of this site.

Target Audience

Not only are individual users meant to get weather reports from this site, but it also services most, or maybe all, of the commercial and private weather sites on the internet.  As may become apparent, we can hope and pray that our government doesn't really expect Joe web user to get normal weather information from this site.

Content

Weather.gov has two kinds of content.  First, it has big graphics of radar maps of precipitation and clouds, and maps of pressure and other such things.  Second it has plain text.  The biggest problem with the text content is that it is incomprehensible to the average human, or for all I know to the average Ph.D. in Meteorology.  Their National Weather Summary page was an unmanageably long list of major U.S. cities with the temperature and "weather," such as "CLDY," which we can probably assume means cloudy but that isn't very descriptive.

There is a link on the main page to a World Weather part of the site but the only section that works is the United States!  Not even Canada, clicking on which at least gives a more detailed map, has weather information.  Clicking on Asia, Europe, or Africa all gave the same error message.

Site Plan & Navigation

Not too good.  The main page is simple enough.  It's main problem is the six images it has that are also links– they have no titles or anything.  One of them, for example, goes to the same place as the "Local Weather" button, but their is no way to tell this except by looking at their URLs.  Despite this rather major navigation problem, the real difficulties are in how long it takes to get to the information one is seeking.  Clicking on the local weather button takes you to that map of the United States.  From there, if you want weather information on a place in Massachusetts, you click on that part of the map.  This leads you to yet another page with a map, but of course its not that simple.  At this point, if you were to rashly click on the map in the area you wanted a weather forecast for, you would get only local conditions (it does tell you so at the bottom of the map).  Instead, you have to click on the zone forecast, which gives you a long unformatted page of the forecasts for a whole bunch of zones, in no particular order, and some of the zones for Massachusetts included eastern New York and Hartford.

There is no uniform navigational aid available on every page or even, for that matter, any two pages.  The closest the site comes to that is "Back to Main" links, common — but far from universal — to the sites pages, that take you not to your main page but to the starting page (which gives the option of high, low, or no graphics versions of the site), a decidedly unuseful navigational device.  In one place the "main page" link didn't even work.

Links

A Great Links link takes you to a page of "Interesting Sites" (whose URL ends with "cool.html").  They are all related to weather in some way, and some, such as the weather cams, really are interesting or cool, although "great" is going a bit far.

The other important set of links are to sites where you can get software to recieve government weather data directly and so even set up your own weather site.  Given the raw data presentation of content at this site, providing weather information to other sites that present the data in a more user-friendly manner is probably the main reason for this site's existence.

Page Design

First of all, no ads.  Yay!  The majority of the space on most pages is used by the content.  None of the pages however adjust at all in any significant way to different browser window sizes.  This is actually something of a feat, since virtually every page is predicated on a completely different design.  There is almost no continuity.  On one page, National Items, the dark purple 'back' link is on a black background and is barely visible, let alone legible.

Aside from the maps, most content was presented in the form of preformatted data such as this information on Massachusetts area climate.  The blue-green borders put in with an HTML table do not do much to disguise the lack of styling of the text which could make it easier to comprehend.

Creativity

Obscene overuse of the blink tag marks our governments attempts at creativity.  The other vastly more successful — by comparison — attempts to spruce up the page involve graphics which are too dark as well as backgrounds and colors that generally worked fine.  Frankly, the weather maps themselves are enough to make the pages that had them visually interesting.

Functionality

The URL of this site is http://weather.gov and don't you forget it!  There are no "www"s.  If you were to be so foolish and ignorant as to try to access the site as www.weather.gov, however reasonable an address this may be for a site on the World Wide Web, it will not work.  Your browser will spend upwards of two minutes going through the motions of not going anywhere before telling you: "Invalid request -- no address for host www.weatherinfo.gov."  Call me old-fashioned, but I remember a time back in the mid-1990s when the idea of the Web and URLs were to make navigating easier.  I consider having a web page with a non-standard address that does not make the simple effort of receiving all users who access its two top-level domains definitely dysfunctional.

A number of parts of the site simply didn't work or said information was not available at the time (after you clicked the link, of course). One such place was the short term forecast.

NCSA Mosaic could only navigate through the site using its text version, and of course the same goes for Lynx.  For Mosaic it was a shame, since it could handle the animated GIFs, that they made an imagemap that it didn't work with.

Unique Features

National warnings (really, warnings for particular states or parts of states) were a major element of weather.gov.  More important as a unique feature, or at least more useful in general, than the separate National Warnings Area was the listing of current alerts by state at the bottom of the main page.

Animated weather maps like this one are simply cool.

E-mail: melancon@student.umass.edu

©2000 September 17 · beMWeb