This year we’ve been working on making several improvements to the website and today we can announce the following positive changes…

You can now SHARE our stories!
Using Facebook or Twitter you’ll note at the bottom of our stories, photos and Auckland forecast page you can now “Tweet” or “Like” the page you’re on.  Doing so will add it to your Twitter page or Facebook wall.  It’s a great way for our stories to be seen by others too – and the more readers we have on our website, the easier it us for us to add other things (like national forecasts – which we are also working on!).

Uploading Photos
For sometime now it’s been a bit tricky finding the link to upload your photos to our site.  Now we’ve created a clear button at the top of the page for you to easily upload photos straight from your computer.   By the way, we’re working on a new gallery layout too (much more user friendly) and this will be up and running in the very near future – we’re just testing it for bugs.  Speaking of the Photo Gallery, we’ve added a link to that at the top of the page too, next to the Videos button.

Homepage more “Clickable”
Some of you told us you wanted the photo in the lead story – and the smaller thumbnail photos associated with the other top three news items – to be clickable.  This makes it quicker and easier to click the story you want.  This is now up and running too.

Changes still to come
We have several other projects on the go too…

Gallery – As we said above, the Gallery is being overhauled to make it more user friendly.  We hope to have this up and running shortly.

Maps page – We are working with Weathermap.co.nz to provide you easy access to their best maps, which we’ll provide here at WeatherWatch.co.nz.  These maps are the same ones we use in our NZHerald.co.nz videos.  They are a fantastic resource and we’ve found them especially accurate – more so than other providers here in New Zealand, which is why we’re backing them for our site too. 

Auckland forecasts – We’re creating better, more accurate, icons plus forecasts that are more consistent from one day to the next.   This may take a while to create but we have highlighted it as a top priority.

Nationwide forecasts – We are still working on this and are accutely aware of how long it’s taken us to roll out.  The recession two years ago was the main reason for halting work on doing this, then last year ownership of this website changed, which again caused another year long delay.  We are pleased to now be working with private forecasting organisations here in New Zealand and in America to come up with a product that we feel is accurate but also user friendly. 

Thanks for all your support and ideas.  We do take them all onboard.

Kind regards

The WeatherWatch.co.nz Team