We believe that less is more when it comes to banking Web sites. When you have useful, profitable products to sell, why dilute your message and brand with third-party promotions? Most users simply want fast account access or quick resolution to a problem; everything else just gets in the way.¹

One exception to the “no clutter” rule is weather information. Why? Because weather info delivered by a bank plays to tradition and demonstrates your bond to the local community. And, it’s cheap.

Where I grew up you could always count on the sign on the local bank to keep you apprised of the local time and temperature. As with most advertising, it would be tough to measure its impact on the bottom line, but it served as a useful beacon of the bank’s presence in the community.

We have long suggested taking the same approach on the Web .It could well be the single most cost-effective way to drive traffic. Unlike business news and stock quotes, local weather has a broad appeal. According to a study of 600 active Internet users, approximately 50% had looked up local weather information (see Table 1, below). The number would likely be higher if the information was more conveniently located.

WeatherBug users are very frequent visitors, hitting its site an average of 13 times per month, making it the most loyal site on the Web, even ahead of runner-up AOL.

Table 1

Frequency of Accessing Local Content

% of 604 users of the Internet during past two months

Source: Frank Magid Associates

Table 2

Weekly Visitors at News & Information Sites

millions of unique visitors, week ending July 21, 2002

Source: ComScore Media Metrix, week ending July 21, 2002

Visitors = weekly unique visitors; Reach = % of all Web users visiting

During June, the two largest weather sites drew about 15 million unique visitors each according to ComScore Media Metrix. Weather.com (16.4 million) was the 20th busiest site in June, and AWS/WeatherBug (14.5 million) was number 25. More recent numbers show that AWS is now the top News & Info site and the sixth busiest Web site overall when ranked by average daily unique visitors. The week ending July 21, WeatherBug had 5.5 million edging out eBay with 5.3 million.2

Table 3

Daily Visitors at All Web Sites

millions of unique visitors per day, week ending July 21

Source: ComScore Media Metrix, average daily unique visitors weeks ending July 14 and July 21, 2002

The simplest way to add weather is to drop a few lines of Weather.com code into your Web site to display current conditions through its “weather magnet.” This has no cost, but to retrieve forecast information, users must leave your site and subject themselves to time-consuming ads and annoying popups. Many financial institutions bury weather links in a Community or Resources section. NRL Federal Credit Union is one of the few to elevate weather to the home page (below).

NRL Federal Credit Union  www.nrlfcu.org  includes an inquiry box for The Weather Channel on its home page  www.weather.com  The CU preloads the box with the local zip code.

Alternatively, you could contract with a weather supplier such as Meteorlogix (see Golden 1 Credit Union, screenshot right), Intellicast, Accuweather, or WeatherUnderground for a direct weather feed. WeatherUnderground charges as little as $80/month for hourly updates to your site. Intellicast gave us a quote of $75 to $200 per month depending on the amount and frequency of information desired.

A more costly, but potentially more lucrative approach, is to provide a private-branded WeatherBug. This browser plug-in displays real-time temperature in the Windows system tray in the lower-righthand corner of the screen. The temperature is updated every few minutes as long as the user is connected to the Internet. Clicking on the temperature elicits a pop-up weather display with real-time thermometer, clock, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, relative humidity, dew point, wind chill, and a few other base statistics. Furthermore, users can easily access national weather service forecasts and real-time conditions from any of 5,000 weather stations connected to the Net through AWS school-net

Solon State Bank’s home page  www.solanstatebank.com  includes a text link to Intellicast’s ad-supported 10-day forecast

Golden 1 sources its weather from Minneapolis-based Meteorlogix. Current conditions are displayed on the CU’s home page www.golden1.com , with an ad-free forecast on its own page.