Special Topics Project 3 Prepare: GIS and Economic Development

The posted maps were created for the University of West Florida On-Line GIS certification program class, Special Topics in GIS (GIS 4930) as part of the Project 3 Prepare Week assignment focusing on using GIS as a tool for market analysis. The project will be focused on locating the best site for a new book store for a family-owned retail chain that has two stores in the San Francisco area called Better Books.

During the Prepare phase we were asked to do some basic market analysis research using GIS to review demographics and competitors as wells as to look at customer characteristics in relation to store locations.

The first map shows demographics by population block groups in the San Francisco area that are indicators of possible book-buying customers along with the locations of competitor stores classified by yearly sales:



The map was fairly easy to create. The biggest challenges being choosing appropriate symbology for all the elements and then deciding on the best possible layout. I chose to use the library symbol to represent the Better Books stores but made each a different color. You'll see why on the second map.

For each of the block group choropleth parts of the map, I wanted to use fairly muted colors so that the store points for both Better Books and it's competitors would show up. The problem with doing that was the low classifications generally had a color value of white which did not look good against the white background. I played with the color ranges a little bit to make sure I good get the colors to pop a little more. I used green for the money demographics for obvious reasons (money is green).

The second map shows the results of establishing a 1-mile market area buffer around each of the Better Books sites and using it to perform calculations on the demographic data from the census blocks as well as from a separate point data layer that contains sales data on the buying habits of members of a book club, Booklovers:



Again, the map was not too difficult to generate but the spatial data within it was used to perform a number of calculations on customers and potential customers within the market areas of each current store. I figured to lend more credence to my choice of store symbol, I'd go ahead and use the library symbol to create a logo for Better Books and used it to fill some empty map space. I envision the motto of Better Books to be, "Twice as good as going to the Library".

As you can see, this weeks work was not as stressful as the last two projects, so I was able to have a little more fun and focus a little more on map design.