On the creation of iMapWeather
About nine months ago the Balcom Agency’s Chip Hanna, Interactive Account Director and Brian Blankenship, Interactive Creative Director were given a problem to solve.
“We actually had an existing relationship with one of the guys at Weather Design Technologies,” Hanna said. “He told us about this product they had that was really cool, but that they were missing the mark on how to bring it to consumers.”
Once they were given the problem, Hanna and Blankenship spent some time thinking about the challenge and then holed themselves up in a Starbucks. After many, many cups of coffee, the idea for iMapWeather was born.
“After all that coffee, we finally thought about making a social version,” Hanna said. “We didn’t want to create another social network or do what every one else was doing. They all own their markets. But here’s a different way to look at what’s going on, a way for people to connect through the weather. There’s nowhere else that you can share pictures, videos, and short messages that’s just focused on the weather.”
When Hanna and Blankenship had a concept they set to work on the design and turned to the nerds at Sierra Bravo to help them implement their idea.
“Sierra Bravo helped us get our ideas more focused and get them on paper,” Hanna said. “They’ve been able to find a lot of areas where we can be more efficient, and offered great solutions on how to serve the weather data better. They’ve been a big help with the planning and then implementing every single bit of it.”
And though the nerds were all about helping implement this brilliant idea, the great design of the site sprung from the head of Blankenship.
“I have to say, I got a lot of inspiration from Obama’s site. I’m not exactly sure why, but this was while the debates were going on,” Blankenship said. “His site was so much better than anything out there, and they were doing a better job than anyone else on the social aspect.”
Blankenship said he really is proud of how the social aspect of iMapWeather, especially things like the embedded map (soon you’ll be able to adjust the map’s size) that you can grab and put on your website. Design-wise really digs the sprouts
He also really likes the “sprouts” (the orange pluses) that sprout out different icons as you mouse over them to indicate the kinds of content that has been shared about that location.
“One of the things I think is pretty cool is the background,” Blankenship said. “It autodetects what the weather is like in the visitor’s area and reflects the weather and time of day. We thought it would be difficult to do, but Ben [Dolmar, a Programmer/Analyst at Sierra Bravo] made it work.”
This is the second part of a three part series on iMapWeather. Part 1 is here. Part 3 will focus on some of the challenges the project faced and how iMapWeather brings geo-targeting ads to a whole new level.
