Snow-Forecast.com goes multi-lingual
Snow-Forecast.com goes multilingual
Snow-forecast.com, the winter sports weather provider, has announced it is now available in nine different languages. The Cardiff-based website was launched in 1999 by three friends with just one map of the Alps. It now has weather data on over 2100 mountain resorts and in excess of 2.7 million enthusiasts logging on every month to find out where the snow is. Updated four times a day, it is the biggest online provider of specialist weather for snow sports, recording over 90,000 daily visitors. Now available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Hebrew and Greek, the company expects to see these figures snowball.
Snow-forecast.com invites users to explore the weather in ski resorts around the world, and to plan your winter holiday from the comfort of your desk. With webcams and reviews on some of the best ski destinations the world has to offer, the site showcases its own exclusive method for snowfall forecasting, unique in weather websites. Browsing the site in your language of preference is done by simply clicking on the country flag on snow-forecast’s home page.
With skiing and snowboarding such popular international sports, regardless of language and nationality, Staff at snow-forecast made the obvious decision to broaden the service’s appeal by translating the site. Nick Russill, Managing Director, said: “Over the years we have seen more and more users who don't speak English, particularly from Eastern Europe, and even the former Soviet Union. We value our visitors very much, so it was clear we should offer our information to them in their own language.”
The company are committed to staying on the cutting edge of weather forecasting sites and see the expansion as an opportunity to offer more customer choice. Nick said: .
“Once we decided to make the site multi-lingual we appealed to our users and were astonished at their generosity in offering their translation services for free. We rewarded them with lifetime membership of the site and some of our exclusive cool t-shirts."
Snow-forecast is proud of its success. Back in the early days the site received the e-commerce award from the Daily Telegraph for best new start-up, and Nick is also a former winner of the Princes Trust’s Young Welsh Entrepreneur of the Year.
“We became hugely popular because nothing similar really existed,” said Nick. The site has consistently enjoyed number one status as the top performing website in the Hitwise online activity monitor. Their success has spawned other websites including www.weather-forecast.com, which provides accurate 6 day forecasts, www.surf-forecast.com, which uses innovative maths for swell prediction and www.tide-forecast.com, which generates tidal information for over 10,000 worldwide locations. Nick said: "By repackaging our innovative weather solutions we were able to expand our focus from purely skiers to anyone whose work or leisure time is reliant on the weather. This includes fishermen, sailors and surfers. Even my Dad uses our local forecast to work out when he can mow his lawn!"
As for the future, there are already plans to provide mountain-forecast.com – a specialist weather site for hill walkers and climbers, and to offer snow-forecast in other languages. Perhaps the next language will be Welsh? Nick said: "We hope to get support from the Welsh Language Board to offer snow-forecast in Welsh. It seems only right with the company being based in South Wales. After all, we include information on several Welsh mountains too.”
French: http://fr.snow-forecast.com
German: http://de.snow-forecast.com
Portuguese: http://pt.snow-forecast.com
Italian: http://it.snow-forecast.com
Dutch: http://nl.snow-forecast.com
Spanish: http://es.snow-forecast.com
Greek: http://gr.snow-forecast.com
Turkish: http://tr.snow-forecast.com
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