I used to use the BBC weather site whenever I needed a forecast. As part of my job I quite often have to find out how the weather is going to be all over the country. A colleague of mine suggested using this site instead and I have been going back ever since.

The home page has a general worded forecast for Britain for that day as well as a weather map and top ten observations. There is a blank white box to enter your postcode or location and then along the top of the page are buttons for the next seven days of the week, clicking on any of these will give a forecast for that specific day either for Britain or your chosen location.

The Metcheck tools are then listed and each element is as follows:-

Next 48 hours - Gives the weather for the next two days spaced at approximately 4 hourly intervals. It details the temperature, how it feels, UV rating, mm of rain, cloud, wind direction and speed and a picture of the weather. These are the same details given when going into a daily forecast.

Synoptic Charts - This details the Met Office's synoptic charts for your chosen area.

Cloudcaster / Cloudwatcher / NOAA Satellite / Premium Home / Week Ahead - these are only available with the Metcheck Premium service, this is an option to subscribe to their service in order to get more detailed information, including specific weather tailored to different hobbies.

If you go into any of the above sections a menu appears on the left hand side of the screen with many other options including 7 day forecast, weather for other countries, flood warnings, lightening data and rain risk.

A drop down tools box becomes available on different pages and has options such as print forecast, send SMS forecast and videos. I think the print feature is particularly good because it just prints the information you want instead of a screen dump with all the banners and adverts on.

I find this site very easy to use; on the BBC site you have to select an area and then a place, I find this difficult as I am often given a town name without knowing whereabouts in the country it is. With Metcheck you can just type in where you want the forecast for and all the information is tailored to that place.

I have to admit I only really use the general forecast pages and rain risk charts, but having a quick look around the other features I can see several uses for this. It has an 8 to 14 day forecast facility, although the longer in advance you look the less reliable the data is, if you were trying to plan activities for the following week a look at this will give the best days to plan whether it will be indoors or outdoors.

I can also see why some may subscribe at a price of just over £3.00 a month. If your business depends on the weather or perhaps you have an outdoor hobby like fishing or wind surfing then the extra information might be worth the cost.

Overall I like this site, it is easy to use and all the information shown is understandable and presented well. I particularly like the colour coding it uses on maps for different types of weather and also severity of rain, snow or wind.

If you need to know whether it's going to be sunny on Sunday or windy on Wednesday this is the place to find out.