Driving into work on Thursday morning I heard an interesting story on NPR. Ok so they have lots of interesting stories but this one struck me because just that morning I had been thinking about the topic for the past couple of days. Here is what the story was:
Marketplace’ Report: Weather Channel Sale
Day to Day, January 3, 2008 ยท
The company that owns the Weather Channel might put the network up for sale along with nine daily newspapers. The channel is expected to sell for close to $5 billion dollars. Madeleine Brand gets the forecast on the sale of the Weather Channel from Marketplace’s Sam Eaton.
Why is this interesting? Well if your like me I check the weather often and I use www.weather.com to do so. This is what your presented with as your first screen.
I have always had problems with using this website. I still manage to get the weather but it is so much work. Aside from the terrible overuse of advertising, the site is poorly designed and the layout, if you can call it that, screams “Please dont use me!”. I can only imagine the usability nightmares that reside behind this mess and what a screen reader does when you visit this site. My biggest complaint of all are the rollover menus, they are like taking the Double Dare Physical Challenge.
Trying to find the correct information your looking for on the site is near to impossible also. Having to scroll through more advertisements then weather related information is again a real problem. I’m sorry but I don’t see how someone who is trying to see if it is going to rain or not will be interested in refinancing their mortgage or choosing a dancing shadow to show how much they like credit cards.
So with one of the last privately owned cable channels, The Weather Channel, going up for sale, and with potential buyers such as Comcast and Time Warner, what is in store for the new weather.com… if there will even be one. I think all we have to look forward to is full page, intrusive, click to close ads and a quest to find out about the weather. It seems even the weather has sold out now at days. Long live the outdoor thermometer in your back yard!
weather widgets have always been one of the most annoying things with computers. there are a thousand stupid ass programs that you can install to get “up to date” weather information which really is just code for spyware. if you have weatherbug installed and ask me to fix your computer, i will yell at you.
i’ve never used or even been to weather.com until just now. i must say i’m disappointed, but not from the design. of course, this layout is atrocious, cluttered, noisy. but these days there is no need for a “weather in 1-click” link (which really requires 2 clicks). those little things called IP addresses can be resolved to indicate a general location of the user. by default, these websites should just give you the local weather in NO-CLICKS. oh hell, i just have an igoogle widget tell me the weekly forecast… it’s my homepage anyway. no clicks. no shitty website.
the only way i can believe this website is going for $5B is the domain name alone. and i’m not sure how i feel about the rise-up menus… it’s different, i don’t hate it, but it seems to rub me the wrong way. also, why are there so many damn sections? is weather really that interesting to justify so many sub-sections?
“the only way i can believe this website is going for $5B…”
I think the parent company is selling everything: the website, TV channel and a couple of newspapers.
Maybe Google will buy it and make it useful easy to use and unintrusive.