20 Comments Add your own

• 1. tdc  |  September 5th, 2008 at 5:25 pm

  too bad we didn’t have something like this in detroit yesterday.

  around sunset you could have seen the ex-mayor’s wife boot his fat ass across the detroit river with the bridge to canada all lit up in the background all the while being told that it would be mostly cloudy today

• 2. Anonymous  |  September 5th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

  Interesting approach. The forecast is pretty creative and good looking. I also liked how the page is fairly clean — there’s lots of white space and the text is usually easy to read. I wish my weather page looked this good.

  On the flip side, the Google map of the stations is worthless; having 300 stations in 3 square-inches on the page isn’t that wonderful. I also wonder how I would feel about the forecast after using it for a few weeks. Would the creativity buzz wear off? Would I just want to have a regular forecast? Hard to say. It also makes me wonder if their sales department is salivating over the thought of selling ads on little billboards on the forecast skyline, or maybe a little flying airplane with a banner.

• 3. yawn  |  September 5th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

  one of curleys designers came up with that idea and executed it at ljworld three years ago.

• 4. Zzzzzz  |  September 5th, 2008 at 10:03 pm

  Ditto, Yawn. Me thinks the Curley golden touch is starting to tarnish a bit. Sorry, Rob. Don’t take it personally. Everybody hits a dry spell. You’ll do great things yet.

• 5. W  |  September 6th, 2008 at 4:12 am

  Yeah, Yawn, I was going to say… he’s rolled this out each place he’s been. Nice graphic, but nothing new here.

• 6. Kent Chapline  |  September 6th, 2008 at 6:28 am

  One of the other great things the Sun has done is its fantastic History of Las Vegas section. The decade-by-decade Flash map, the video, the panoramas, the dozens of articles and the timeline work together seamlessly to create a fantastic user experience. It’s wonderfully rich and immersive. It’s also evergreen, since the history of Vegas is not going to change. So even though the section has been online for a few months now, its drawing power has not faded–which is probably part of the reason the Sun still features a prominent link to the section on its homepage.

  The credits list 33 staffers, and the number of hours they put into it must be staggering. But looking at it from the outside, I think the finished product was worth the effort.

  Las Vegas is a unique city with a great history, and it works perfectly for this kind of project. But there are a lot of American cities with rich histories…

• 7. nasus  |  September 6th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

  I’m less concerned forecast display isn’t exactly new-new, it’s a new approach to local weather and I like it. Seems very “Vegas, Baby!”. Sure, the creativity buzz will eventually wear off, but it will still be cool.

  The Google Map of station locations doesn’t seem worth the page position. I guess when you first see it you could think “wow, lots of stations…”, but it will be ignored in all future visits.

  Oh yeah, the fonts seem kinda big and the page is crazy wide, but maybe that’s the cool thing now…

• 8. Dave  |  September 6th, 2008 at 12:51 pm

  I loved the graphical treatment of the forecast when I first saw this on ljworld.com several years ago.

  The high visibility of the text on the page is a plus — very easy to read.

  However, weather fans tend to be nuts for the subject and there’s no way to satisfy them here. No way to plow through historical data, for instance.

  The Google Map suffers from poor usability. It’s too narrow to show you the bubble that results from a click. You have to drag the map to see the data. Google can and should rebuild these bubbles to hang closer to the map point when clicked. But the narrowness of this map would cause issues either way.

• 9. Rod Overton  |  September 6th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

  This is nothing new.

  Several newspapers have had this concept of using certain images of the city to be displayed when weather conditions warrant. One of the ones I worked for recently did it.

  Zero new. Maybe the Flash aspect is, but that ain’t enough.

  I hate to differ with you Corey, but two annoying things about this:

  1) No Dopplar radar?????????????????????? Really? Sure, there isn’t much in the summer to look at, but c’mon. At least put it up now so people KNOW it is there. That is like saying, “Well, it’s not raining now, so we won’t ever show our radar image on TV until it starts.” No. Wrong thinking. You show things in advance so that people KNOW you have it, so they KNOW where to go WHEN they need it.

  2) Curley, who may be a very nice guy, has a team of people working for him — everywhere he goes. I’m not entirely sure he has been in a position where any strict P&L has been applied to anything he has done (until after he leaves or is on the verge of leaving). It really grates on my nerves because this kind of stuff is JUST what GMs and other ill-informed barely online literate fools JUMP all over. They go for the shiny penny of Flash weather conditions while ignoring even the fundamentals.

  WRAL.com also had the Google map about a year ago — maybe longer….

  Sorry, I can’t suport this fawning over ANOTHER half-baked, “ohhhhhh ahhhhhh” Rob Curley creation. I’ve had enough.

• 10. W  |  September 6th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

  True, Rod. I like Rob but the reality of a budget is something he doesn’t have to deal with.

  He’s a hell of a salesman to keep getting that deal - it’s not his fault that his employers actually go for it… over and over and over again.

  It may speak to his recent nomadic existence, though.

• 11. Paul  |  September 6th, 2008 at 8:49 pm

  I think its nice and refreshing to see a site that isn’t cluttered with useless information. Sure it’s a little spacey and could use a little work, but I like where they are coming from and think it could really work.

  Hey at least they are trying, more than we can say for most stations… at least in my region.

• 12. tdc  |  September 7th, 2008 at 6:58 am

  well, 2007 was the year of the great site clean up, right?

  it’s 2008… “most stations” piled all that crap back on there since their properties are flatlining.

  i admire folks like W who seems sensible when it comes to budgets. but since most of these things were started on a f’in shoestring, has there ever actually been a capital INVESTMENT made?

• 13. Rod Overton  |  September 7th, 2008 at 11:42 am

  One last comment on this issue (I promise):

  Also, — I just noticed this — on the Las Vegas site there is no weather SEARCH!!!

  I can’t believe this.

  All of this talking and swooning and I can’t even enter a different location in, say, Nevada and get the conditions or forecast or radar there?

  Maybe I want to get conditions and forecast on Reno or LA for the weekend? How do I get that?

  Hey, here is an idea: forget the Flash B.S. and sign a contract with Weather Underground for about $400 a month (your rate my vary) and get a full weather almanac, weather search and Dopplar radar — which offers even county-by-county views. Pay a little more and get the Google Earth street-view Dopplar with storm tracking… You can customize Weather Underground’s weather so that it looks exactly like your site.. no one will even know they are your vendor.

  Take a look at what we did at KOAA’s weather for a shoestring from Weather Underground. It cost nearly nothing — I won’t tell the price because it is so low I don’t want WU bombarded with requests for such deals….

  Again, Cory, this is with all due respect… I just can’t believe what I am reading and seeing…. where is the REALITY?

• 14. discreet_chaos  |  September 7th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

  I was going to say that there isn’t much that can beat Wunderground’s use of Google Maps. It marks their weather stations, overlays radar data, storm tracking, satellite imagery and can zoom out or in. I live in the desert, so just because it’s raining at the end of the street doesn’t mean that it’s raining at my house and if need be, I can zoom my local “Wundermap” all the way down to the house.

  (You might think that I’m joking, but I’ve been redoing my roof and I remember at least one time watching a line of showers go by the hospital and another time, I remember showing my kids that it’s raining at the video store, but not at our house)

  Kudos on the site redesign; It looks colorfull and clean, so most of my comment isn’t directed toward Vegas. It’s just that Weather Underground’s mashup of weather data and Google imagery (Wundermap) is something to behold.

• 15. Rod Overton  |  September 7th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

  OK.. last thing about weather — for real this time…

  I still can’t believe how bad newspapers are with weather on the web.

  I actually emailed Howard Weaver and Chris Hendricks (both big wigs at McClatchy) when the Charlotte Observer and Raleigh N&O changed vendors and I could find nothing on their sites about hurricane coverage…. NOTHING.

  I told them that (this is no secret) about 30-50 percent of each TV station’s traffic in all of their markets is from weather. If they could siphon off just 20 percent of that amount from each TV site (with better data and coverage) the results in each market (and then overall) would be great. Just think of the increase to the network!

  Of course, no response. Nada!

  A friend has suggested making weather a better presense on the Greensboro News & Record’s web site, but he was rebuffed by John Robinson with him saying “it’s just better left to TV”

  Wow.

  With thinking like this, why not just do away with the whole weather page in print. It takes up valuable space and is completely pointless now.

  When are these people going to learn?

  As a fan of the underdogs (TV station sites) I hope they (newspapers) never learn. They are generally arrogant fools and have what they deserve developing in front of their eyes.

  I guess creating content that is compelling connects with an audience is also “better left to TV”

  Hilarious!

• 16. Brink  |  September 8th, 2008 at 12:53 am

  Gimmicky does not equal “better” or “innovative.”

  If TV news did something like this, you’d be complaining that they were just playing with cometics.

• 17. dcdave  |  September 8th, 2008 at 6:00 am

  This is really kind of lame. What’s interesting is that data shows folks turn to tv sites, not newspaper sites when there’s severe weather. All this does is give me conditions and temps, which I can easily get by typing say “chicago weather” into Google.

  Give me a break.

• 18. LocalWX  |  September 8th, 2008 at 10:17 am

  What we really should be offering is weather with lots of data and customized to the neighborhood level … similar to what KLAS in Las Vegas is doing.

• 19. wtf  |  September 8th, 2008 at 4:06 pm

  it’s pretty, but still just a weather forecast.

  something i can get in 100000000 different places.

• 20. Rod Overton  |  September 8th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

  I have the full update on the N&O and the status of Weather Underground…

  Just click on my name above to go to the full update… it is a LONG story….

  Is there full closure? Drumroll…..

Leave a Comment

Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed