It turns out life gets busy when you get married, have a kid, and move multiple times. Who  would have thought? So NPMaps has been on my backburner for some time now. Fortunately, in recent months, I’ve finally been able to tackle some changes I’ve been eyeing for years. I’ll highlight these changes below in way more detail than you might ever want.

A better mobile experience

When I launched this site 12 (!!) years ago, the vast majority of visitors were on desktops or laptops. I admit that the mobile experience wasn’t great, as I never paid much attention to it since I rarely used my phone to browse the web. But nowadays, a ton of users are browsing on phones (including me), so I finally took the time to fix all the formatting issues that plagued the mobile site. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s far more usable than before.

Brand new interactive maps

There’s nothing quite like seeing a big unexpected charge to your bank account!

Right now, I have 141 park pages on the site and 141 interactive Google Maps to go with them. (These appear in the sidebar if you’re on desktop or at the bottom of each page if you’re on mobile.) I like having them because *I* use them all the time when researching parks, and it’s so nice to flip between Satellite and Terrain view to get a better sense of place.

Here’s the problem: last month, Google changed their fee structure. Out of the blue, it suddenly cost me more to display those 141 maps than it cost to host the entire rest of NPMaps. The easiest solution would have been to delete the interactive maps and call it a day, but instead, I found an alternative way to implement Google Maps that doesn’t cost me anything.

So, you’ll see that the interactive maps are back online (they’re just served differently behind the scenes). The small embedded map boxes aren’t super detailed by default, but if you click the “View larger map” button, you’ll open a full-sized Google Maps interface that’s much more useful. I’ve centered each map on a major park location for easy viewing.

At 10 minutes per map, redoing 141 of them was no easy lift, but it was worth it to keep interactive maps available.

Better transparency

One challenge of maintaining a site like this is deciding how much I should care about trying to earn anything off it. It costs money out of my pocket to pay for web hosting, bandwidth, domain names, and everything else, and at the very least, I’d like to recoup those costs, and maybe even earn something for the thousands of hours I’ve put into the site.

But pretty much every way of monetizing a website makes the user experience worse, almost without exception. Don’t you hate those “Join our newsletter!” or “Buy my recipe book!” pop-ups you’re always closing? Videos autoplaying in the sidebar? “Enter your email to continue reading”? It makes me nostalgic for the early days of the web.

And I wrestle with this. I very well could make decent money by putting up barriers between you and the free maps. But I don’t want to. So, what’s the appropriate middle ground?

For now, the route I’ve chosen is to use affiliate links only — no ads, no pop-ups, no tracking cookies, no email lists, no nothing. I’ve chosen partners that seem relevant to what a user might already be looking for, so that means links to waterproof trail maps on Amazon, links to lodging maps on Expedia, and links to art prints and gifts on Zazzle.

Over the years, though, I realized the affiliate links weren’t as obvious as I wanted them to be. I never wanted anyone to be surprised they were leaving NPMaps when clicking a link. So I recently taught myself a bit more about web design and experimented with some different options. And now, as I mention in each page’s introduction, links are now color-coded: internal links sit against a plain white background, and affiliate links sit against a colored background shade. I also specify where each link will take you, so no one should ever feel misled.

The ironic part is that this actually reduces my income, as there’s more money to be made by fooling people into clicking affiliate links. But I feel better about transparency, so in the end, I chose to painstakingly update every page to make this change.

A bit more on dollars and cents

Since I’m on the topic of transparency, I want to dive deeper because I’m genuinely uncertain about the best way to move forward. Both Amazon and Zazzle have significantly reduced their payout percentages since I first started NPMaps, and there’s so much competition on Google that my site is often hard for users to find. This means that each year, I take in a little less money while hosting fees creep a little higher.

So I’m stumped on what I can do to turn the tide. Especially now that I have a toddler at home to provide for, the last thing I want to do is lose money to keep the site online. So what are my options?

Well, I could add more affiliate links. For the most part, I do feel like my links aren’t too intrusive, especially on the pages with dozens of maps. A couple of links to lodging and hiking maps seem appropriate on a long page. And now that I have a better system for identifying affiliate links, I plan to add in lodging maps to the pages currently without them. That might earn me enough for a free lunch a couple times a year.

I’m also toying with the idea of partnering with other sites. Could I integrate with AllTrails somehow? What about collaborating with tour guide sites, like Viator or GetYourGuide? Or instead of Amazon links, would it be worthwhile to include referrals to Patagonia or REI? The last thing I want is a site cluttered with affiliate links, so I’ll need to be conservative lest my site begin feeling spammy.

A friend suggested creating downloadable PDF trip-planning guides to the parks I know well. That does sound kind of fun, but it also seems like the worst possible time to start something like that when anyone can ask AI to plan a trip for them. Would anyone really pay for that? Along similar lines, I could sell little trip-planning Zoom consultations or try to make myself into some sort of national park travel guru/travel agent, but I have neither the time nor charisma for something like that.

So…stay tuned as I muddle ahead. (“Muddle ahead” is pretty much my life motto at this point.) My goal is to keep NPMaps in the green while still easy to use, so I’ll keep experimenting to see what makes sense without compromising the site’s spirit. For now, I’ve added the (maybe somewhat tacky?) donation link in the sidebar of each page. It felt like some low-hanging fruit to help keep the lights on while I figured out a longer-term plan.

Thanks to those of you who’ve sent in supportive emails and donated. It puts some wind at my back and keeps me motivated to move forward.

OK, enough behind-the-scenes talk. Onward! 2,000 maps is inching every closer…