Description: What is it?

Weather extensions enable your website to display the current weather, or weather forecasts for almost anywhere in the world. Some extensions allow the weather data to be combined with other related information from regions around the globe.

The source of the data varies with the extension, but many/most of them get it from free sources like yahoo, The Weather Channel, or The National Weather Service. Other extensions provide data for specific countries. A few display a scrollable map that allows the user to navigate to any location, click on the map, and retrieve the current weather conditions for that specific place.

Weather Users: Who needs it?

Knowing if it’s going to rain tomorrow is something almost everyone wants to know, and the agricultural need for weather data is obvious; but weather data has other applications too. Companies in the energy industry pay close attention to the weather, and reminds us of the global shipping business and the entire transportation sector, all of whom are also weather dependent.

Public works administrators around the world, and any business – large or small – related to construction projects of any size or scope including the businesses that keep all these hardworking peoples’ bellies full. That’s who needs weather information.

Everybody wants to know when it’s going to rain, and it’s always been that way. Commodity markets move with the weather, and they in turn push the financial sector one way or the other. Weather affects the outcome of many economic events. Weather affects consumer shopping, and retail-shopping sales can fall dramatically when the weather is bad. Bad weather coincided with the holiday season can have disastrous results for thousands and thousands of businesses large and small.

Everybody needs it, that’s the bottom line.

Weather Features: What does it do?

Weather extensions can display weather data in many different ways, but essentially, they all just retrieve weather data at defined intervals. After the data is loaded, the user can display it almost any way they choose. Choices include real time graphic displays of one location or a ticker with the current weather for each of your offices around the world.

Although weather information on a page can be one of the primary functions of the page/site, it is also an easy unobtrusive way to jazz up a site too. Sometimes weather data is a good way to break up monotony in a header, footer, or banner.

It’s hard to define an exact benefit for weather info, but suffice it to say – even all the TV stations provide scrolling weather info, and they invest a lot of money researching what consumers want.

[Need to establish a style sheet for the term page, website. CMS can be local too; does the language stay the same in both venues?]