My first love in life – well after my family – is surfing. I would happily give up everything else (well maybe not coffee) in order to surf all day and everyday in perfect surf. That unfortunately is a bit of a pipedream and while I live only an hour or two from a few world class surf breaks my daily surf experience often consists of just checking the surf on a handful of surf report and surf cam sites.

Some of the sites do the whole surf cam, surf blog and surf forecast thing really well but from a design point of view all of the sites I found in my search could do with a little 2010 cheer. My top two favourites would have to be coastalwatch and swellnet but I still find the layouts and design elements a little too complex for my liking. Here are a selection of surf websites around the world that deal with the dark art of surf forecasting and swell prediction.

I think the common issue with the sites is how they incorporate advertisements and monetising strategies into the page. I realise this is a major consideration as its probably the life blood of the site in may respects but Im sure in a lot of the cases you could minimise the impact on the user experience while still bring in the dollars.

If I were designing for any one of these companies/sites I think I would try to keep the focus on the images. As a surfer the photos of glassy, crystal blue water is enough to keep me coming back. The functionality is secondary to some good old fashion surf porn, in the way of glassed off  uncrowded surf session perfection. I’d give the page lots of space, some large blocks for an content/image slideshow, a nice grid based news sections and some minimal unobtrusive advertising.

The best of the bunch.

Swellnet

I visit Swellnet everyday and the quality of the surf forecast verges on alchemy. There have been days when Ive been out in the surf and they have predicted a wind change or wave increase to the minute – well at least to the hour. There are quite a few things I dont like about the design. The biggest is probably the moving video advertisements that are probably pretty effective in catching your eye but they never make me want to click them. The other minor thing is that the home menu item is on the bottom of the menu – I can see why they have done it but it always seems odd. I do however love the wave of the day section as well as the way they mix up the swellnet session and surf politik sections.

Coastalwatch

I like the coastalwatch website in general but I think that the front page could really use a little more definition and I think the advertisements tend to make the site feel cluttered and hard to navigate. I think more clearly designed outlines and separators would help the layout a lot but I love the palette in the header though and the sub pages tend to be better put together.

Surfline

The surfline frontpage is well organised considering the information thats contained on it. There are plenty of tabs and slideshows used to display the information and while this can lend itself to an overly complicated layout I think the borders and separators on the front page help to keep it all in line. There is a heavy reliance of advertising on the site with some pages and features loading after 10 to 15 seconds of advertisement which gets  a little frustrating after a while.

Useful sites but could use a refresh.

Trigger Brothers

The Trigger Brothers suffers again from poorly spaced out elements on the page as well as an overuse (or overly important placement) of a generic google ad block. The surfcams themselves are very helpful though.

Wave Watch

Wave watch looks like its been taking notice of a few of the design movements over the last few years but the navigation and complexity of the latest news areas at the bottom really let this site down. I do however like the larger blocks used for the surf cam and featured content areas.

The Rest

Here are a few other surfing websites that dont raise the design stakes and could use with a considerable reboot or refresh.

SwellInfo

Magic Seaweed

Wet Sand

Surf Forecast