About Us

I co-own and operate an aviation application service provider (MyFBO.com). I do a lot of the regular web site design work. Although I am pretty knowledgeable with HTML, CSS, DHTML when it comes to programming I am an amateur. I have picked up bits and pieces of .asp, javascript, and xml/xsl just because my job calls for it, but not a lot.

Weather4Webs.com came to be because I design a lot of aviation web sites. A common request from clients is to have a weather page on their sites. I always thought that weather was better left to official sources and adding weather was kind of re-inventing the wheel. But with virtually every client requesting it I thought I should do something.

I browsed the web for weather products for web sites and I was not pleased. The big weather sites out there all have "magnets" available, but they are essentially big advertisements for those sites. The magnets offer very little for web site designers in terms of style. Also, when I navigated to the sites I was hit with unclear pages, third party cookies and pop up ads.

Some of those same big weather sites had xml feeds available, but had strict requirements on linking. One of those sites requires a link for every product and their logo on the page that has to be at least as big as yours. For a five day forecast, this meant six links on of them being a logo. I have no problem crediting those sites with a very nice "courtesy of", but six times for one feed, come on.

I knew most of the data was in the public domain so I went to the National Weather Service. Although most of the data is readily available, accessing some of it required me to put on my programming hat.

Weather4Webs.com is a work in progress. I will share my work as I continue to figure things out. It is intended to be a no frills source of weather information for webs. There will never be ads on the actually product, just a small link.

Feel free to use the information on your web sites just remember it is not for resale. If it is going to run on a copyrighted site you need read the NWS disclaimer. The weather data is reliable, however no one should depend their life on it and you should disclaim it. People should still rely upon official sources.