This article presents well-balanced finite volume weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes to solve the shallow water equations (SWEs). Well-balanced schemes are characterized by preservation of the steady state  exactly at the discrete level. The well-balanced property is of paramount importance in practical applications where many studied phenomena are regarded as small perturbations to equilibrium states. To achieve the well-balanced property, numerical fluxes presented here are constructed by means of a suitable conservative variables decomposition and the hydrostatic reconstruction idea. This decomposition strategy allows us to realize a novel simple source term approximation. Both rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive numerical examples all verify that the resulting schemes maintain the well-balanced property exactly. Furthermore, numerical results strongly imply that the proposed schemes can accurately capture small perturbations to the steady state and keep the genuine high-order accuracy for smooth solutions.