A map is a picture. An atlas is an index plus a picture. That distinction decides whether people can actually use the thing you built.
The moment a picture stops scaling
At a handful of locations, a visual map is enough. At a hundred, it becomes a decorative background: pretty, unusable, and impossible to search. The atlas that works is the one where every location has a stable URL, a short description, and the same set of fields, so the whole thing is searchable and linkable.
Stable identifiers are infrastructure
If a location has no stable identifier, nothing can reference it: not the search on your site, not a guide someone else writes, not a bookmark a user saves. Naming things consistently is not tidiness, it is the feature.
The pages people actually land on
Landing pages for atlases are almost always individual entries, not the home page. Which means every entry has to stand alone: what it is, where it sits relative to the rest, and what you might want next.
The home page is for returning users. The entries are for everyone arriving from a search.
If you are building a reference like this, write the The Via atlas entry template before you write the entries.
Notes from turning a hand-drawn map into something search engines could index.
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