‘Your new website sucks’: Bureau of Meteorology redesign is lightning rod for heated criticism | Australia weather

It was designed to be clean and clear, but the Bureau of Meteorology’s new website has come under criticism for being confusing, cumbersome and “really, really bad”.

After years of development, the government site, which has 2.6 billion page views annually, was relaunched Wednesday. home page It offers users a snapshot of the weather in capital cities across the country and the latest news updates from the bureau.

Rainfall radars, weather maps, MetEye, industry pages, custom forecasts and historical data can be found via tabs and buttons on the home page; some of these link to the old site while the pages are still migrated.

The redesign, the first in 12 years, sparked outrage from some users, who quickly took to social media to tell the bureau what they thought of the change, according to Andrea Peace, the bureau’s senior meteorologist.

One Facebook user commented on a post by BoM: “Give us back our site. We don’t want this new one.”

a member Wingers Forster Tuncurry the band said: “Hate with a capital ‘H’… what were they thinking?”

Another user said: “I think I’ll go back to old school vibes… look out the window, then put on a coat, grab my umbrella and hope for the best… much better than the ‘new’ forecast page.”

_{Sign up: AÜ Breaking News email}

Thomas Hinterdorfer: Tracking Extreme Weather Conditions He wrote to the office via a social media post: “Your new website sucks… The website is cumbersome and extremely difficult to navigate.”

A Reddit user who accessed the site’s beta page before launch said the site was “simplified.”

A farm owner from Glen Innes, New South Wales, who wished to remain anonymous, told Guardian Australia the change was a “backward step”.

“The new site tells me that if you live in the city and want to know what the temperature is, it’s easy,” he said.

“But we’re cool nerds and like to see more in-depth information. This site is really bad.”

Perhaps its biggest pain point was that accessing vital water and land data for farmers now required three clicks; the last click redirected him to the “excellent” agriculture and natural resources management page on the old site.

“If they change that too, it would really be a step backwards,” he said.

Less common positive comments included praise for the site’s simplicity and aggregated location data.

“I had 2 bookmarks for the radar map and my local forecast, now they are all on one page and I can delete one of my bookmarks,” one user wrote.

Peace said the new interface is “clean and simple,” as well as customizable, more secure, accessible and stable than before, and will continue to be improved with community input.

“The old site had over 72,000 pages. Search functionality was limited and there was no way to customize it,” he said.

“It’s going to take some time for people to get used to the new website… most of it is there, it’s just a matter of finding the new path.”

He said some pages of the old site had not yet been mapped to the new site, while others would not appear. Rain forecast radar, one of the popular features of the application, will be integrated into the new site “in time”.

“We know people are very passionate about the weather,” he said. “People feel like they truly own the bureau’s website, and so we expected people would face some challenges in adapting to this change. “We just hope someone finds something new every time they use it.”

The renewal has been a long time coming. The bureau’s 2018-19 annual report mentioned that a new website was being created for the agency. The agency said in its 2022-23 annual report that it will complete public beta testing of the new website next year.

In 2022, the bureau caused a storm of controversy online when it said it should no longer be referred to by its acronym, but first by its full name, then as “The Bureau”.

Additional reporting by Graham Readfearn