For some local markets, weather dominates the news and nowhere is that more apt than in the Hawkeye State. With bitter winters, a violent tornado season and sweltering summers, weather is no small talk in Iowa. Neither is KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, whose weather coverage has no equal among Iowa television stations. When they launched their first site with BIM in 2005, weather was a dominant feature. This held true again in 2007, when we relaunched them with new features, new focus and a new design.

While weather is important for many stations and many markets, it is a difficult beast to tame from a design perspective. For most of the year, it is in the background - forecasts and 7-day outlooks tend to blend into the daily grind. Usually, it's a simple quick glance on your way out the door. But when a major weather event hits, such as a hurricane, violent thunderstorm or blizzard, a website can quickly become swamped with the increase in traffic. It's not unusual to see more than a 500% increase in traffic for even the most common of weather events.

For KCRG, it was important that their site handle that kind of spike in weather interest from both a design and technical standpoint. The technical side has always been easy. With our choice of server architecture and outstanding technology partners, we have enjoyed greater than 99.9% uptime every year since our founding. The design for KCRG, then, was the key.

When work started, the decision was made to have some sort of weather information in the header. A recent addition to Broadcast Interactive Media's ever increasing arsenal of tools, placing weather information in the header allows any user to quickly see the most recent conditions and radar. The weather section, key to those severe weather spikes, took longer.

In addition to the focus on weather, KCRG decided to relaunch with a wider layout, allowing for more emphasis on the breadth of their news coverage. The wide layout also enabled them to highlight video more, something their newspaper competitors in the market couldn't match.

The wider layout also allowed them to experiment a little with new types of content, bringing in national video from the AP and pop culture news from TMZ.com.

Throughout the process, the weather section started to solidify. By the time the new site launched, a full-featured weather section with looping Doppler radar, regional forecasts and satellite imagery had taken hold.

KCRG's newly relaunched site continued in their tradition of a strong weather presence and a wide range of award-winning hard news coverage. With the addition of more prominent video and less traditional sources of content, we helped them push even further, solidifying their market dominance and, perhaps more importantly, giving them the tools to continue growing into the next several years.