Back in July, Protect the Wild launched a new website, bloodbusiness.info “a community-driven, fully searchable website that helps pro-wildlife people like ourselves choose where we spend our money based on our personal preferences.”
Opening the floodgates
We took the decision to publish and – incredibly – in the first three days we were deluged! Over 300 emails arrived, some with multiple businesses that supporters wanted to see on the site. We appreciated every single one of them, but it took three of us nearly a month to read them all, check the links, and write them up.
As we were working through them, more emails would arrive…
At the same time we were developing a mapping system. Each listing generates a ‘pin’ based on the county, town, and /or postcode of the business, making it easy to see where all the individual listed businesses were and how many businesses were listed in eg Devon or near Derby.
At first, though, the maps appeared not to be working. There were blank areas everywhere. We realised it was because we had too few ‘pins’ scattered across too huge an area for the system to make much sense of things. The solution? To keep adding pins as fast as we could!
Finally, with 450 listed businesses and with 450 pins in place we have the mapping we have always wanted!
How it all works
The image below is the default map zoomed in a little to show a snapshot of Wales and southern England. It’s already looking messy, and bear in mind we want to at least double the number of pins/businesses listed by next Spring and you can get an idea of how unuseable it could all become without clustering.
That explains the ‘clusters’. You’ll also notice in the search bar above the map there are two search fields along with five of the ‘business type categories’ we put each new business into.
Why two? Because the one on the left (as you look at the page) searches through our internal database of existing business pages. It doesn’t search externally, like a full Google search. That means that if you want to know if there are any listed businesses near you, and your town isn’t listed in the database, nothing will show up in the search. If you live near or are planning on visiting a town, though – for example Norwich – simply enter that town in the Location field on the right and the search will return every listed business within a default radius of 25 miles – in this case within 25 miles of Norwich Town Centre.
You can also define that search more narrowly by also ticking any of the business type boxes. So, for example, by ticking the Venue box and searching Norwich, you will get every venue we have listed within 25 miles of Norwich, as in the image below.
As we add more businesses over the coming months those open spaces or gaps will start to be filled with more pins. It’s unlikely we will ever list every town in the whole of the UK though, so while we may well review the functionality in the future at the moment we think this is the best way to set things up.
Not everyone who visits bloodbusiness.info will read this Substack of course, so you will notice that we have also added an expandable ‘Need help’ box at the top of the search bar. Simply click on that and it opens up. Obviously we can’t replicate the full explanation we’ve given here, but hopefully while concise there is enough information to be useful.
As the help box shows the ‘search the database’ field is useful in any number of ways. You’re not confined to just looking for the name of a business or where it is. If you want to know every listing in our database that mentions eg ‘pheasant’ (so most shooting estates and the occasional pub!) type pheasant in search, click the magnifying glass icon, and this is what you will get…
Click on any of the pins or clusters or simply use the + zoom-in function in the bottom right corner of the map and you can explore any of the businesses that contain the word ‘pheasant’.
Trends and other tidbits
Two months after we launched bloodbusiness.info we are seeing some very interesting trends that we think make the whole project even more useful than a list of businesses and where they are.
Like just how much shooting or hunting there is in Devon for example (see the image above), how many businesses make great play of being located near National Parks or of their ‘idyllic’ surroundings, and how casual shooting businesses are about the huge numbers of birds they sell to ‘tourists’…but all that is for another post.
Any questions?
We’ve delayed announcing this major upgrade to the functionality of bloodbusiness.info until we really had the maps working the way we wanted them. We really hope you find what we have created useful and worth exploring. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them.
Talking of questions, we’d like to thank Simon Clay of Sly Design who really went above and beyond to understand what we wanted to do with this site and how best to achieve it. He really is the ‘fourth’ member of the bloodbusiness team and if you’re looking for help with a website we highly recommend talking with him.
