New Weather.gov website becomes operational

Date Posted: July 1, 2012

The National Weather Service today made operational a redesign of its website, Weather.gov, including city forecast pages and the NWS mobile site. Along with the refreshed design — the first since 2002 — Weather.gov now features improved content organization, allows visitors to view weather at a glance and save their location (our top feature request from users), and creates a framework for improved consistency and organization across all agency web sites. Meanwhile, our new mobile site has been optimized for modern smartphones.

Weather.gov garners some 60 million unique visitors per month. That number can jump from 3 to 10 times during high-impact weather events such as landfalling hurricanes, crippling blizzards, and tornado outbreaks.

“We hope the enhancements we’ve made not only provide an enhanced experience for users today, but also provide a platform for innovation as we move forward improving the Weather.gov web presence,” said Project Manager Bradley Akamine of the NWS Office of Science and Technology.

This new design is the beginning of a phased effort to update the NWS web presence and improve customer access to information and services. The design was developed in-house based on ongoing user feedback, search query analysis, surveys of NWS local offices, usability testing, and best practices. NWS received 35,000 comments during the April-May public comment period.

The new design will be executed gradually across the NWS Web presence. Weather.gov top-level pages and local point forecast pages were the first to adopt the new design. NWS regions, national centers, weather forecast offices, and other NWS websites will adopt the refreshed design in later stages.