Weathering the Storm

While it's true that you don't actually need weather forecasts on a daily basis in the way that you need food, gas, or clothing, weather.com is built around the bedrock belief that the more weather information you get, the better off you are. You may not be able to control the elements, but you can be properly prepared for them. Maybe you avoid getting sick by wearing a sweater on a night that you know will turn chilly. Maybe you save time by taking an earlier flight in order to avoid having your plane delayed by an approaching thunderstorm. Maybe you reschedule an afternoon sailing trip with your kids because it's supposed to rain that day.

Consequently, weather.com focuses on translating reams of weather data not only into timely, local forecasts but also into information about activities affected by the weather, such as sailing, gardening, golf, or travel. The result is a site that has grown to about 300,000 pages -- more than a million if you count the inventory of maps. Until recently, though, finding what you needed was at times like wandering through a quirky bookstore. So besides overhauling its hardware this year, the staff is in the process of completely redesigning the site. To accompany its bread-and-butter content, updated maps, and forecasts, the site is adding tools that report flight arrivals and that rate golf-course conditions. "What we've found is that customers want a forecast, but that's not all they want to know," says Wilson. "It's just the beginning."

But if you don't put customers in control and give them quick, easy access to the most relevant material, they won't stick around. That's an ongoing concern at weather.com. Although past research has indicated that the audience is growing, says Walrath, the company has been troubled by another statistic: On average, visitors come to the site six times a month -- not quite twice a week. Frequency of use is a revealing measure of loyalty, Walrath explains, and although the six-times-a-month rating is good for a weather site, it's roughly one-third that of a top portal. "Obviously, everybody can't come to us every day, but we want to get to the point where a lot more people are coming on a daily basis," he says.

He realizes that at some point the number of weather.com users will stop doubling every year, so strengthening the relationship with existing customers is critical. This is one of the main goals of the redesign, which changes the way that users see weather: Different users see the information that applies directly to them. For instance, while rain is equally important to a golfer and a gardener in Seattle, wind conditions are more relevant to the golfer and the overnight low temperature is more relevant to the gardener. The site should reflect both views. In other words, weather-related information needs to be put in context for each user. The challenge has been how to merge weather data with activity data.

Information architect David Davila, 34, spent months designing the new navigation. What he came up with resembles a wheel -- with the user in the center and with the most relevant information to that user located on spokes that are only one or two mouse clicks away. Before the redesign, the site used a navigation tree that had relatively few branches. Even though those branches ran deep, it might take a user a half-dozen clicks to locate something. Now, rather than having to look along two separate branches of the site to find, say, golf-related links and Houston weather maps, the site presents the two in close proximity, based on a user's input. The view isn't limited to golf, though. All the other links related to Houston, such as local allergy or travel content, are also on the page. This is not simply more information -- but more meaningful information.

Besides more customized views of the weather, weather.com offers its users an in-depth perspective on how weather works and how it affects the world. Since the site isn't limited by the time constraints that limit broadcast television, weather.com features a much wider assortment of material: from the latest weather stories in the United States and abroad to research papers written by the channel's meteorologists. As a writer and producer, Julie Galle, 26, typically writes or updates three to five stories a day for weather.com's news center. After a morning briefing with one of the meteorologists in the channel's first-floor studio, she brainstorms with a handful of colleagues about the day's possible stories. Today's lineup: the latest on Hurricane Debby, which had been downgraded to a tropical storm; the possible relief that a monsoon around the Canadian border could bring to people fighting forest fires in Montana and Idaho; and the effects of a drought on a Louisiana bayou.

Although weather is always making news somewhere, some days are more eventful than others -- a reality that requires Galle to see news stories where others might overlook them. Some stories are whimsical. "It never rains at the Emmys. Isn't that a cool story?" Galle asks. Others are dramatic, like the one-year anniversary of the tornado that hit Oklahoma City. Galle discovered empty lots where houses had once stood and trees without treetops. She met a woman who had survived the storm by huddling in a closet with her children as the rest of the house was destroyed. "That story makes you realize that the things we report on -- the storms, the hurricanes, the tornadoes -- affect someone out there," Galle says.