Post 32: Weather vs Accuweather.com

Weather.com is the weather site run by The Weather Channel. It seems like they put more emphasis on their features, pictures, videos, and other parts of their site than they do giving people their local weather. The top left corner of the homepage’s banner has a place where you can enter your zip code to get your local weather, but instead of taking you to a site where it has local weather for your everyday average person, it sends you to a site that has business travel features. It is difficult to get to a site that shows you your local weather and other features that will give anyone the weather they need to get dressed properly the next day or to figure out if their child will have a baseball game. It used to be a great deal more difficult to get to a map with radar or satellite for your area, but they have recently put that map on the city’s local page which has made it much more accessible.

They have some tools on the site, but they are pretty basic. They have a toolbar for Internet Explorer, RSS feeds (like every site does now), e-mail alerts to any weather statements, watches or warnings, and the ability to get weather on your cell phone, PDA or desktop. Also, the site offers “Intellicast,” a program that lets you customize the settings of maps and forecasts to make it fit onto your website, but this is not offered free. Their free tool for putting weather on your site or blog isn’t designed for your average person. When filling out the forms needed to get the program for your site, you must have a business name, industry, email, and phone number. I was looking to add this tool to my blog, but when it asked me for all of the above information, I didn’t have anything to fill in those parts of the application. There is nothing in the information about the program that says it is only for a business website, and it is very frustrating when you go through filling out all of the forms that lead up to the one asking for your business information, with no hints that it might not be for your average everyday website or blog, and you finally get to the second to last page where you find that you don’t get the tool unless you own or work for a business. There are no unique tools on the site and it seems like they put more value on someone who is going to their site for more information on nothing having to do with their local weather and more having to do with general weather information.

AccuWeather.com however is a site completely dedicated to giving people their weather and giving people extensive information about it without much other stuff to get in the way. Their home page has pretty much everything someone could ever want to help them understand their weather and what it will be like in the next week. Pretty much every aspect of their site is accessible all from the homepage. They have weather headlines, blogs, updates, numerous maps, videos, services, and even photo galleries.

They have a bunch of different tools, all separated out on sites that are tailored to a specific segment of the people who may access their site. I specifically visited the page for Consumers, but they have pages for Business, Education, Media, and Government, and the tools on each page are specifically tailored to those fields. I think this shows that they aren’t just in it to get people to come to their site and actually want to help people understand their weather. Also, the tool that is used to put a box with the weather forecast on your own site is free, and they don’t even ask you for as little as an email address, let alone business information. I think this really shoes that they just want to give people their weather, and figure if they can get their name out in the world more often, more people will end up at their site through clicking on these tools placed on other websites.

If I had to choose between either one to always go to for my local weather, I would definitely use AccuWeather.com. They seem to find it more important to give people their weather than to squeeze every cent they can out of the consumers.