A fresh new look for summer – metservice.com website redesign
MetService is currently working on a brand new metservice.com – it is being overhauled from top to bottom and is due for the big launch in early December.
This follows a major review where we have considered user feedback, met with metservice.com user testing groups and had a look at best practice around the world. The MetService website is one of the most visited in the country and dear to the hearts of Kiwis, we know, so we have made changes carefully. It has been five years since the last redesign. We hope you will agree that the designs are a huge improvement in many ways.
Please note it is the website’s design and usability that has been reviewed, not the actual content. All the information you know and love will still be available (however – just quietly – there are a few bonuses thrown in too!).
The new website will:
• Effectively deliver important weather information to the New Zealand public
• Provide a fresh new look and feel
• Improve the ease of finding information on the website
• Enable faster page loading
A lot of research and testing has been undertaken to ensure any changes make sense to you, the user.
This follows a ‘back-end’ rebuild which was completed earlier this year which has enabled exponentially more traffic at any one time.
Below are some sneak preview screen shots of the new design (things may still change a little though).
Home Page:
Auckland City Page:
We look forward to bringing you the real thing in the coming weeks!
Looks good but is it Dial up friendly. Not all of NZ is able to get BB and I am one who can not. SO many sites today are geared for BB and can take up to 5mins for a page to load. Please remember me and others like me and let us see the info we want first and not the ads on the side. Coloured backgrounds are also very slow to load.
Also do we now have to go to a separate page to see the rain radar?
i hope one of the new features is actually a weather-controlling widget … web 3.0 here we come!
Thanks for your comments. Yes, we are aware of the issues people on farms and on dial-up unfortunately experience. This has been something we have kept in mind from the beginning of the re-design, so hopefully you’ll find the majority of pages load faster on the new website.
At this stage, the latest rain radar images will be on a separate page to the towns and cities weather page. This reduces the page size and makes it faster to load.
The website is ever-evolving, so you’ll continue to see improvements into the new year and beyond.
Just so long as the new site has all the functionality of the current one – which is just fine by me. (If it ain’t broke etc..)
I do like the forcast features of the metvuw site, helps plan longer term fishing trips etc. So a bit of that would be good too:-)
Looks good on a quick squizz. Clean and easy to navigate. It will take a few attempts to find all the favourites again but they all seem to be there.
On the rural pages, I always want to click a neighbouring region on the map to find out what’s happening there – any chances????
On the ten day urban forcasts, I found the dividers between each day a little difficult to make out. How about being a couple of shades darker.
Is there an archive of weather data on MetService? Sometimes I’d like to be able to look back at how much rain we had last October …
I just had to blog again here….Absolutely love the new look and the new website! Big congrats to the metservice team for getting it together! I love it and am also enjoying the blog function. I love especially the weather videos feature, the lightening storms of wellington blew me away! Thanks again…metservice fan
flash! well done. looking forward to having a good look around