Brief thoughts on: the new Australian Bureau of Meteorology website
For those outside of Australia, the BOM website (https://www.bom.gov.au) is where many Australians access weather information. It’s very popular with millions of visits per day, especially to the rain radar, and “the BOM” is even part of everyday language and culture. So much so that an attempt to prevent use of the acronym generated widespread criticism (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/11/bom-rebranding-aimed-to-overcome-negative-associations-related-to-the-acronym-internal-documents-reveal).
The recent redesign of the site, the first in over a decade, has proven controversial (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-27/bureau-of-meteorology-pushes-ahead-with-new-website/105937612). My thoughts, as someone who uses many websites and even designed a few back in the day:
• I don’t think the overall look is terrible, although there is rather too much whitespace for my liking. It’s instantly recognisable as a site built using Drupal (https://new.drupal.org/home) which, long-time readers may recall, powered the Nodalpoint bioinformatics forum.
• $4.1 million – sounds like a lot of money but that’s how governments do things. Why use in-house expertise when you can pay an external consultant 3x the daily rate of the internal employee tasked with telling them everything that they need to know. Yes, I am writing from experience.
• There are a couple of obvious flaws that I would fix. The part of the entry page shown below is not visible in the desktop version of the site unless the user scrolls down to the bottom of the page.
Yet it contains two of the most important links: information about the new site and the rain radar. The latter is probably the most used feature of the BOM website. So how about moving those links to a menu at the top of the page.
• I’d also highlight that the best way to use the new site is simply to add your location to the favourites. It requires a change in mindset from the old website – “select your radar from the map of all radars” – to the new – “search for your location and you’ll see the rain, no need to think about the radar itself”.
That results in what I think is really quite a nice summary page with most of the relevant information for where the user lives, including the all-important rain radar.
With more details available from the “More weather” link.
Negative feedback seems to be the default response to website redesign. The cynic in me suggests that it’s more newsworthy than positive feedback. We’re told that “social media and radio talkback [are] awash with criticism”. I note that the new website itself provides ample opportunity to send feedback, and that might be a more productive route than screaming into the online echo chamber.
In grumpy old man mode I also wrote:
but I do fear that more and more, we are creating a world where people expect “answers on a plate”, and become less-adept problem solvers as a result.
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