The New Weather.com: We’re All Gonna Die
The Weather Channel’s new weather.com has been out for a few weeks now. I couldn’t help but notice the four feature articles for 7/29/10.
All bad things, sure. Whether you buy into the reports and dire straits of Mother Earth or not is really not the issue for me. Lately, I find myself avoiding the home page at all cost. The news appears so bad I literally feel myself getting stressed out when I arrive there.
The Weather.com Home Page Feature Section
When did the Weather Channel stop reporting the weather?
At the same time that news outlets stopped writing news I guess. Like most widely used sites, weather.com has been slowly evolving since its inception. Look back and you’ll see their home page features morph from fact-based to sensational.
As their corporate machine – the Weather Channel, once proudly independent is now owned in part by NBC Universal - focuses more on controversial media and advertising and less on what’s happening in your backyard.
Don’t get me wrong: there are several aspects of the new site I really like. Larger font, asynchronous weather fetching, clearer interaction on the main nav bar, to name a few.
I guess I just miss the old days, when weather.com’s home page simply gave me, well, the weather.
At the risk of sounding both nostalgic and cynical a la grandpa’s back-when-I-was-your-age quips, I’ll simply end by saying, the best sites to me are the ones that stick to core competencies. Part of being ‘simple’ is being honest. Penning climate change on a weather site, while related, is off track.
I welcome your opinions, both in support and in refute. But please keep them clean and not mean. Bloggers are people too.
