Four years back I was sitting with my team in San Jose. We were deliberating about the need to take notice of changing user behavior and expectations as it was no longer the publishers who were defining the rules, it was the users. Bandwidths had become amazing and drab content was definitely not need of the hour. So we decided it was time for us to take baby steps and bring about a phenomenal change in the way we presented data. Thus, Mapsofworld.com – Infographics section was born.
Over the last four years we have re-looked at thousands of pages with an aim to explore whether they could be transformed? Can they have a more colorful life, which while being beautiful to look at, also aids a user to understand, comprehend and remember better. A few pages succeed while majority of pages are rejected due to impracticality of the whole thing.
It is a long road for us as Mapsofworld.com has over 30,000 pages of content, and painstakingly we are reviewing each page. Few pages do pass our check of feasibility but need to be turned down due to the whole exercise being financially impractical. If a page can’t do 100,000 page views in its lifetime, it would never be able to pay its cost of transition. Too bad, all of Mapsofworld.com would never get converted to graphic predominant structure.
By now, we have worked on the 50 States, US Fast Facts, Cuisines, US Universities, Trophies, Travel Destinations and quite a few other themes. We have a guideline, which clearly states that each infographic must incorporate at least one map and that has been enriching the mapping vertical we love and belong too.