Design
The design of weather.com is fairly straight forward; images and more images. This becomes a nightmare for lower speed internet connections. The images on the site do make it attractive to look at but the majority of them don’t seem necessary. Another problem I noticed with design is just the amount of seemingly random information scattered around the page. It would take some time for a user to scan this page to find any information they are looking for. The site is not all problems and negativity though. I do like how when the page loads some of the more important information is already right in front of my eyes. This is good for people that are just looking for a quick fix for the national weather conditions. It becomes more of an egg hunt when you want to find some local weather. My recommendation would be to ease up on the graphics and better outline or highlight more information dealing with local and national weather, rather than the other “random” information there is on the page.
Code Validity
The code is not even close to being html strict. With 226 errors and 14 warnings on just the main page running Mozilla Firefox, some work can be done on the code. The majority of the errors are about a required attribute not being specified or characters not being allowed. Plus as I scanned the code it was so difficult to follow that anyone needing to edit the code would need a manual to find what they are looking for because it seems so messy. Hopefully they have lots of comments to help web editors edit the page when needed because I couldn’t even find the basic html to this website.
CSS Implementation
To me, the CSS implementation was very interesting. When I disabled CSS the only information on the website that I got was some footer information and a log in area. The footer section even included about 90% of the page then without CSS. If somebody had CSS disabled so that they would only access the text of the homepage for text to speech software, they would most likely not be able to use this site. As I looked at the CSS code I was thinking to myself that I hope they have written down somewhere what all there tags and divs are named because they have some off the wall names for each one of them. If I were in charge of that CSS I would have used names that anyone would be able to understand what divs the CSS was being implemented for.
Usability and Accessibility
I tested the tab feature for this website and it would not be logical to tab through this site to get to the links a user is searching for. Nothing on this page has any alternate text including images. Once again making it difficult to use without CSS and difficult to use for web users who have accessibility problems due to disorders or health problems.