Traditionally, Welsh public sector websites have used a .gov.uk sub-domain for both Welsh and English language sites. Since 2015, the Welsh Government has encouraged the use of .llyw.cymru and .gov.wales domains for public sector websites. Recently, local authorities have increasingly started to switch.

iShare Maps supports publishing multi-lingual My House and My Maps sites. Welsh authorities such as Anglesey use this feature to publish spatial data in both Welsh and English sites, each with a unique domain name.

During its recent iShare Maps v6 upgrade, Anglesey chose to transition to .llyw.cymru and .gov.wales domains for their public My House and My Maps sites. To achieve this, new domain names were set up in parallel with the existing .gov.uk domains and a transparent redirect was put in place from the .gov.uk domains to the new .llyw.cymru and .gov.wales domains:

• The Welsh site at https://mapiau.ynysmon.gov.uk/ redirects to https://mapiau.ynysmon.llyw.cymru/
• The English site at https://maps.anglesey.gov.uk/ redirects to https://maps.anglesey.gov.wales/

Embedded maps, such as Spotlight, and integrations were updated to use the new domain names, while end users are transparently redirected.

Coming soon…

With the rollout of iShare Maps v6.0.9, Welsh authorities will be able to customise the Spotlight user interface text via iShare Studio. As with iShare Maps itself, the language of a site is linked to the iShare URL. Using the iShare URL of a Welsh site will cause Spotlight to use the Welsh language associated with that site.