Introducing… Maps
March 20, 2012 Leave a comment
Over the past few months, we’ve been pretty busy, and pretty quiet. Most of our time has been spent finishing off the transfer from our old site to our new Warwickshire Direct / Council / Staff and Partners sites, and it’s been a pretty complex process – but it’s almost there.
While we’ve been doing that however, we’ve also been working on another, open, project. Maps.
To give a little backstory, we’ve wanted a replacement for Google Maps on the Warwickshire Direct site for almost as long as the new style has been live.
Not because we don’t like Google Maps – we think they’re brilliant – but we can’t get around some Ordnance Survey issues, and we just can’t afford their new pricing model.
So one afternoon three months ago, we sat down on a day where there weren’t many people in the office, grabbed a coffee, put our earphones in and began looking seriously at open projects. And in particular, we began looking at Open Layers in great detail.
And in the space of an afternoon – we had a (very rough) demo of a mapping site, using Open Layers to load a Google Map as its base, with some of our Open Data on top of it.
Shortly after that, when we’d shown the map off to a few people, we swapped the Google Map base out for OpenStreetMap. And then we put some OS derived data on top of it as a test.
Which looked – lovely. And before we knew it – we had something pretty flexible, and pretty powerful – and completely free.
About two months ago, we opened it up to our internal staff – specifically asking them to be be honest (and harsh) with us about what they thought. Our first round of testing (over the Christmas period) told us that our users weren’t going to use maps in the way we’d expected them to, and so we changed our approach dramatically. A little while later, changes to make the maps more usable were made – and we set a new version live.
Then people asked us to include some new things, and we did. And we tested how quickly we could swap out the base map for the entire system.
So with the rough drafts, the dramatic changes, the inclusions of new things, the swapping out of maps and the (fairly) constant set of updates and changes that we’re rolling out (plus, we’ve re-written it three times from the ground up, forgot to mention that) – you’re probably thinking that we must be spending a lot of time and energy on this. Right?
Nope.
That’s the best thing about all of this. From the start (six months ago) to now (mid March at the time of writing) – we’ve done roughly four weeks (20 working days) worth of ‘development’ work on it. And when I say ‘we’, I mean one member of staff doing the development – three pitching in with brilliant ideas. Work fitted in around other priorities, we should add.
If you’d like to look at our new maps, try one of these links:
…both should be mobile friendly, but there are subtle differences between each version. Why? We just couldn’t decide which design we liked more – so we thought we’d leave it up to you to tell us.
When you’re using the maps please remember to give us as much feedback as possible. We really do want to make this a public led mapping system – and we can’t do that, without you.
By the way – we should add – we’re extremely thankful to the members of the Mappa Mercia project (a local OpenStreetMap group) who gave us a huge amount of help over the past few months, and lots of encouragement. They even trawled through Warwickshire data to try and clean up the map in advance of the launch – and they did it all for free. If you’re interested in mapping and you live around these parts – we’d thoroughly encourage you to go to a meetup and contribute to a truly amazing project.
Plus, our developer liked Open Layers and OpenStreetMap so much, he moved the project into an open WordPress theme – which he’ll be launching in the near future.
But now that we’ve done it – we’re left with a nagging question.
“Why on earth didn’t we do this before?”
