A rare thing happened with some shop mapping I was doing just now. I was adding “HOM Concept” from my Mapillary view out of a bus window. I looked up the website of the shop …and look! OpenStreetMap!

Actually it might be the first time I’ve ever come across a contact page for a small London shop (just a few branches) as I was mapping, and found an OpenStreetMap map.

I have noticed OSM maps popping up around the web more and more lately. That’s something I’ve always pondered ways of encouraging, dreaming up quite a few different angles on the challenge of attracting web developers to use OpenStreetMap, but I guess it’s predictable that the thing which really shifts them off google maps is google maps themselves, as they start getting more strict with charging for high traffic.

I find it significant to see something like the HOM concept website using OpenStreetMap because it’s a very small organisation. I guess they will have paid somebody to do a quick web-design job for them, and that somebody has chosen to quickly do the map with OpenStreetMap, which is great to see! Also great to see not-the-standard OpenStreetMap tiles, both from a tile usage policy point of view (We want web developers to get maps from a diverse range of tile servers, not always hitting one central OSMF hosted server) and because the choice of a black ‘n’ white style (wmflabs tile server) with a yellow marker fits rather well with their colour scheme.

There’s a few not so great things. Some folks will have already spotted the lack of OpenStreetMap credits. In fact they seem to have accidentally covered them up with a black box. It only happens if the browser is wider than 1060px actually. Otherwise the layout is completely different and the normal credits appear on there. This black box is some weird scroll progress bar widget which seems a bit pointless. So that’s annoying, but we know people make mistakes like that. What else?…

Call me a stickler, but I feel a contact page map marker really should point at the right place… like really… I find it quite unfathomable that someone would put together a map for users to find a business, and then put the pointer in the wrong place! And yet I’ve seen it a lot. One cause I’ve noticed is that some google map widgets can be set-up, not with coordinates, but with a geocode happening every time on an address or postcode, which obviously might then be a little off (even so, you’d think the web developer would notice this and think maybe it’s something they ought to find a way to fix). That’s not the case here. They’ve just coded coordinates in the wrong place. Should be more like 51.58697/-0.10138.

But while we’re looking at the marker position, d’you notice something else funny about it? This is another thing I notice web developers getting wrong a lot. Never with google maps. Always with leaflet. I’d like to say it’s only a mistake made by novice web map developers, but I had to point out and fix the same mistake on the map marker of the State Of The Map website last year. Is nobody else noticing this? Well maybe I’ll leave that as a puzzle for you, because I think it deserves it’s own separate blog post.

It’s fun to grumble about other people’s web map mistakes. But it’s more fun when people mess up using google maps. On the whole my primary message to “HOM Concept” web designer would be… “Yay! OpenStreetMap!”