01 Guldkorn kring Svartån
A guide to seventy-six small places along the Svartån river in Småland — farm shops, cafés, heritage farms, nature reserves. Most of them are easy to drive straight past, so the job was to make them easy to find. I built the site around a custom map instead of a menu.
Lighthouse — Desktop, Oct 2026
- Performance
- 57
- Accessibility
- 92
- Best practices
- 100
- SEO
- 92
The map is built directly on the Google Maps JavaScript API, not dropped in as an embed. I switched the default Google interface off completely and restyled the tiles through a cloud map ID, so the map arrives in the same muted greens as the rest of the site. Every pin is the project’s own SVG, one per category, placed as an Advanced Marker — a real DOM element that can be styled like the rest of the page, not a flattened image.
The pins filter in place — by category, or by one of the seven themed guides — with no page reload. Opening a pin shows the photograph, the category tag in that category’s colour and a link to the place. Every place carries a coordinate, so each place page also gets its own small map showing just that one location.
A map this heavy should not slow down a site that is mostly read. The API loads asynchronously and only once the map is opened, so the rest of the site does not pay for it. The button that opens it stays fixed in the corner: a labelled pill on a desktop, a plain circle with an accessible name on a phone.
Done in collaboration with my colleague at Wirke, built on Bedrock and Sage with custom post types and Gutenberg blocks.
