Friendly Forecast

About Us

About Friendly Forecast

Though this section says it is about us, it's actually more about me and this project. My name is Darshan Montgomery, I live in Canmore Alberta Canada and am the founder of Friendly Forecast. I invite you to take a few moments and read how Friendly Forecast came into being, learn about some of the triumphs and setbacks, and what I have planned for the future.

Before Friendly Forecast I had a network of travel sites that was my first big foray into the world of programming and internet entrepreneurship. Those travel sites did not perform as well as I would have liked save for one. It was a travel site for Victoria BC Canada and it had a steady flow of visitors. In investigating new ways of attracting more visitors to the site, I noticed a lot of people searching for Victoria BC weather, so I went ahead and added a page to the site devoted to Victoria's weather. Within a few months that one little weather page on that travel site was receiving more visitors than the rest of the site. I knew I was on to something special.

For a bit of context, back around 2010-2011 there was only a handful of weather sites mostly just giving out basic weather information. I noticed there were other weather/environment products scattered about the internet and I thought that these should be brought together to make a more complete weather forecast. I also noticed people were searching for historical weather data, and the available sources at the time for this were clunky and sometimes you had to wait for the data to be emailed to you, and that email didn't always come as I found out.

So I dove in creating Friendly Forecast. I brought the current conditions, long range forecasts, satellite and radar imagery and started saving the collected data and created an easy to use historical data section all under one roof. The site was officially launched in 2012 and within a few months Friendly Forecast was receiving 1000's of visitors a day.

Over the years I continued adding to Friendly Forecast. I added marine forecasts, weather warnings, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, traffic conditions, traffic cameras, road conditions, power outages and news articles. By 2015 Friendly Forecast was one of the best weather websites on the net. But, it didn't last.

Google started showing weather forecasts in their search results. Other weather service sites started popping up. A massive shift to mobile devices was already underway and a lot of weather info seekers were getting their forecasts in apps on their phones, a failed to see the gravity of this. Friendly Forecast was loosing visitors and revenue. I had to go back to my day job, which meant, I would have less time to devote to this website, but I continued to build and maintain

The biggest tragedy happened in June 2018. There was a major server failure and everything was lost. I had backups of the site, but not the historical data, it was lost forever. At this time I was just about to start another job and I only had time to put the site back to a minimal level. Just weather, warnings and news.

So now, here I am writing this in May of 2020 during the Covid Pandemic. I now have some time on my hands and have started building and improving the site once again. But, this free time wont last forever, I'll have to go back to work soon.

I plan to eventually get this site back to its former glory. And after that, I have planned advancements for the satellite section, build a phone app and so much more, little things that will catch your eye from time to time.

Darshan.


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