Weather.com has, at least in my mind, always been the go-to place for weather forcasts. I don’t know why I made the association… oh wait! It’s because its probably one of the best domain names on the Internet.  Nice job.  Anyway, my only compaint has been that there is so much clutter inbetween me typing in my ZIP code and getting the actual forecast.  Wait no longer, the site had a redesign this last week!

Weather.com did an excellent job branding the redesign as an overwhelming improvement, stating that the changes were based on the following customer feedback:

• the site is too cluttered
• I can’t find what I’m looking for
• The site is too slow
• The site is too hard to navigate

You’ll probably see that same kind of feedback on a lot of ad-supported sites!  In the redesign, Weather.com added new features like saved locations, weather apps and user contributed pictures and video, as well as a large slideshow that highlights top stories and regional coverage.  The redesign added a more comfortable layout, better top-level navigation and menus and did an excellent job of blurring site content with ads – check the right column.

Overall, I give it a B+ and a better commendation of continuing to use the site.

I think this is a clever way of presenting the user with an explaination about why a page can’t be loaded – well it’s better than a logout or a 404 anyway.

It would be even better if the link I just clicked on from the last page would take me where I am supposed to go, but I guess that concept is outdated.

In an appreciably small book, Seth Godin focus in on the period in life when increased effort yields the same or worse results. Convention wisdom teaches that this is the time to “stick it out” and that quitters never win. But Godin counters with this insight, “Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”

The Dip is a quick exploration of how we get into this dip and when we should stick it out and when we never should have been there. The key is knowing beforehand if it will be worth all the effort, adds Godin, “you should outline your quitting strategy before the discomfort sets in.”
Do you have the guts to quit so that you can succeed at the right thing? Do you really believe that you can be really successful at the right thing, not just average at something?

Interesting stuff. Read it for a quick insight into the things that you may be failing at because you won’t quit.