Best practices for sharing

You can add value to your maps and applications by sharing them to or beyond your organization. Sharing your high-quality maps, beautiful visualizations, and rich analytic GIS models through the website is an easy way to extend your work to your organization or the open web community. Below are some best practices for making your shared items stand out as authoritative and interesting.

Relevant information

Relevant information is a key component of a great map or application. Whether topical, general interest, operational, or a showcase, great shared items convey useful information in an attractive and usable format. Some examples include an imagery map of a current environmental disaster, a layer showing county-level federal spending on health care, and a JavaScript routing sample that includes a code attachment.

Usable format

To reach the largest number of people, be sure to share your item with everybody. Share items that are usable by a wide audience, such as a web map, or useful to a specific audience, such as ArcGIS package files. Regardless of the format or audience, be sure the data behind the map or application is accessible to everybody who might open your item.

Attractive thumbnail image

A beautiful thumbnail image will help your item stand out in a list of search results. Check the image that the website adds by default. If it doesn't seem inspiring or accurate, replace it with your own. The best-looking images fit into the thumbnail space (200 pixels by 133 pixels) without having to be resized. Be sure to use a format supported by web browsers: PNG, GIF, or JPEG.

Informative item details

Aim to be clear and specific in describing your item details. Spend some time coming up with an informative title, summary, description, and tags so others understand the purpose of your content. Be sure to include accurate access and use constraints, credits, and spatial extent. Finally, be sure to respond to any comments somebody adds about your item. You might even proactively add comments to promote a specific feature of your map or application. For example, you could encourage users to check out a new aerial image you've just added to your web map.

Descriptive profile

Take advantage of your profile to establish your authority in geographic information, map design, application development, and so on. Useful descriptive information includes your first and last name, the organization you belong to, contact information, and your areas of expertise and interests. Adding an image that represents you or your organization will help personalize your description.