Hello! May I view a map of New York?

UI approach? UX expectations? Logical reasoning and SEO challenges, welcome to a simple ubiquitous question – may I view a map of New York?   For  a map maker this question may not be complete by itself. Mapping site developer in me hates this question and points out, ‘let us make it simple.’ Make it simple, really? Yes, really. It took us quite a learning to get our maps right. If someone asks for a New York map, we don’t show him New York city map, we instead show him the New York state map. We are right, but a whole lot of users take a minute to decode what we are doing, especially users who are searching for New York from countries other than the US and Canada. They all feel that New York is New York, that whenever a reference to New York is made, it means we refer to the New York City – a belief that is hopelessly incorrect.

Each word has tens of prime access words. New York City on the Web  is referred to as NYC, NY City, New York City, City of New York and so on. At Mapsofworld, we went ahead and tried our level best to position the site distinctly and we succeeded.

Another challenge that comes, at times is, in the form of mutual substitution due to ignorance. Let us say someone wishes to see a Map of Manhattan, New York and uses the search term Map of New York and gets to see a map of the New York State, instead. Now that person surely doesn’t know he is doing something completely wrong, but how to tell him? At Mapsofworld, we decided that we would give related links on the right column and hope he looks around, having not found an exact match. That seemed like the best option to us.

The journey for Mapsofworld to zero down on NYC Map was not a short one, not coming from the US – it was a kind of revelation for us. But then making of Mapsofworld was never to be a plain Vanilla exercise, right? This is how we finally handled the New York City Map – NYC Map