A licensed in-home day care directory built around a person's address
A directory experiment for licensed in-home day care providers, where the map is the friendly surface and the crawlable state, city and provider routes are the actual product — with coordinates deliberately approximate because the address is somebody's home.
A directory of in-home day care providers has an unusual constraint: the thing being published is a person's home address. A map that is precise is a map that is unsafe, and a directory that hides the provider behind a search box is a directory no search engine can send anyone to.
How I solved it
- A crawlable route model — state, city, facet and provider pages — that is separate from the interactive map. Each provider has a real page with real text, so a parent searching for care in a named city lands on something readable rather than on an empty application shell.
- Approximate coordinates by design. The map is useful for "this is the general area", and the exact address is a conversation between the parent and the provider.
- Normalised provider imports with source freshness, so a provider whose licensing data has gone stale is visible as stale rather than quietly staying published.
- JSON-LD and size-limited sitemaps generated from the same canonical route model the pages come from, so the structured data cannot disagree with the page.
Where it stands
This is an experiment with a working architecture, not a launched service with traffic. The stack at the recorded point was Laravel and PHP with Tailwind, using Leaflet over Protomaps tiles for the map.
No private-home coordinate appears in any illustration of this work.
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