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It was designed to be clean and clear, but the Bureau of Meteorology’s new website has come in for criticism for being confusing, clunky and “really, really bad”.

After years of development, the government site, which has 2.6bn page views a year, was relaunched on Wednesday, its homepage giving users a snapshot of weather in capital cities around the country and latest news updates from the bureau.

Rain radars, weather maps, MetEye, industry pages, specialised forecasts and historical data can be found via tabs and buttons on the main page, some of which link back to the former site while pages are still being migrated across.

The first redesign in 12 years, according to the bureau’s senior meteorologist, Andrea Peace, has raised the ire of some users, who quickly took to social media to tell the bureau just what they thought of the change.

One Facebook user commented on a BoM post, saying: “Give us our site back. We don’t want this new one.”

A member of the Whingers Forster Tuncurry group said: “Hate it with a capital ‘H’ … what the hell were they thinking?”

Another user said: “I think I will go back to the old fashioned weather … look out the window and then wear a coat, take an umbrella and hope for the best … much better than this ‘new’ forecast page.”

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Thomas Hinterdorfer: Extreme Weather Chaser wrote to the bureau via a social media post: “Your new website sucks … The website is clunky, extremely difficult to navigate.”

A Reddit user who accessed the site’s beta page before the launch said the site had been “dumbed down”.

A farm owner from Glen Innes in New South Wales, who asked for her name to be withheld, told Guardian Australia the change was a “step backwards”.

“What the new site says to me is, if you live in the city and want to find out what temperature it is, it’s dead easy,” she said.

“But we are weather nuts and we like to be able to see more in-depth information. This site is really, really bad.”

Perhaps her biggest gripe was that it now takes three clicks to access water and land data that is crucial to farmers – with the last click redirecting her to the “excellent” agriculture and natural resources management page within the old site.

“If they change that, too, it will really be a retrograde step,” she said.

Among the less common positive comments was praise for the site’s simplicity and its consolidated location data.

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“I had 2 bookmarks for the radar map and my local forecast, now it’s all on the one page and I can delete one of my bookmarks,” one user wrote.

Peace said the new interface was “very much about trying to make it clean and simple”, as well as being customisable and more secure, accessible and stable than the old – and would continue to be developed with community input.

“The legacy site had over 72,000 pages. It had limited search functionality, there was no way to customise it,” she said.

“It is going to take some time for people to get used to the new website … most things are there, it’s just about finding the new way.”

Some of the old site’s pages are yet to be mapped on to the new site, she said, while others will not be brought across. One popular feature on the app, its predicted rain radar, will be integrated to the new site “in time”.

“We know that people are very passionate about the weather,” she said. “People feel real ownership of the bureau’s website – and so we did expect that there would be some challenges for people to adapt to this change. We just hope that each time someone uses it, they’ll find something new.”

The overhaul has been a long time coming. The bureau’s annual report of 2018-19 referred to a new website being built for the agency. In its 2022-23 annual report, the agency said it would complete public beta testing of its new website the following year.

In 2022, the bureau caused a storm of controversy online when it said it should no longer be referred to by its acronym but by its full name in the first instance and “the Bureau” thereafter.

Additional reporting by Graham Readfearn