What we offer
Knowco US Map is a WordPress plugin. It puts a responsive scalable vector graphic (SVG) map of all fifty states — plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — on any page or post, and sends each state wherever you want it to go. Small states in the northeast get labeled boxes beside the map so they stay clickable at any size. It works on your desktop, tablet or mobile site.
How we build it
Nothing we could find kept fifty states current without either a developer on call or a monthly fee for a hosted service. So we wrote it, and it has run on that site ever since.
Our map on SchoolChoiceFunding.com turned into a WordPress plugin that we could offer others because we noticed the need for such a map kept turning up elsewhere: a directory with a page per state, a service business with coverage areas, a campaign with state-level data, a school or funding program whose rules differ everywhere. If it was worth building once for ourselves, we thought other people may as well benefit from it.
Here are the other technical details your developer might want to know:
- No external requests. The free plugin talks to nobody. It loads no fonts, no analytics, no CDN, and it does not phone home. Everything it needs ships inside it.
- No jQuery, and no build step for the front end. The map is plain JavaScript against the DOM. Scripts are minified for release, and the readable originals ship beside them.
- Assets load only where a map does. A page without a map downloads nothing from us.
- Accessible and crawlable without JavaScript. The SVG carries an ARIA label, and a hidden, crawlable list of real links covers every state for screen readers, search engines, and anyone without JavaScript, with a plain dropdown alternative on mobile. States are not yet operable directly from the keyboard — that's on our list.
- Your settings are yours. Nothing we gate ever deletes anything. If a license lapses, the affected features stop taking effect and every value stays exactly where you put it, ready to come back the moment it is active again. Maps you have already built are never disabled.
Free and Pro
The free plugin is a finished product, not a demo. One map, edited directly, with every state clickable through a URL pattern, its own color, label and name, a hover tooltip with the state name, search, five color themes, the container card, a mobile dropdown, the block and the shortcode, SEO output, print support and the developer reference. Plenty of sites need nothing else, and that is a perfectly good outcome.
Pro is for the cases that need more: multiple maps, a custom link and tooltip text per state, hiding or disabling individual states, popovers with an image and rich text, a pinch-to-zoom mobile map, data-driven shading, regions, guided tours, click analytics, the mega dropdown, letting other websites embed your map while you see the traffic each one sends back, and nine more starter templates. Pro funds our work and pays for support.
Open source
Both plugins are released under the GPL v2 or later, like WordPress itself. That is not a marketing line — it means you receive the source, and you may read it, change it and run it on as many sites as you like. What a Pro subscription buys is automatic updates, a license key, and someone to email. See the terms for exactly how that works.
Talk to us
There is no ticketing system and no bot. Email support@knowco.co and a person reads it. Bug reports that include your WordPress version and what you expected to happen get prioritized — see the contact page for what helps.