Writing ielts task 1: Developments in the town of Lakeside

The question is in the picture.

This is my first attempt to this kind of IELTS writing task 1, which is known as describing map. Therefore my essay was really cumbersome in some extent. I wanna ask, how do you usually approach to this kind of question? Any value answer or feedback is appreciative.

Writing

The two given pictures display the development of a town in Lakeside from 2000 to 2009.

As can be seen clearly from these pictures, the town has undergone a significant change in most features, except for school, river and Northwestern residential area.

In 2000, there were Derelic Warehouse and Old Town located to the west of the lake. Nine years later, while the lake was replaced by pond, Derelic warehouse and Old Town were made place to Car park and Office and University respectively.

Prior to the advent of the shopping center in 2009 on the southwest of the map, there was a residential area there nine years ago. Opposite to the shopping center in the Northside was a cinema, which was a replacement for the previous art center of the year 2000. Finally, the most noticeable change was the removal of the south residential area. It was eliminated to make more space for the Industrial complex expansion in 2009.

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General advice: in writing task 1, in para 1, you normally paraphrase the question in you own words. you introduce the reader to the question by just switching up a few words from the question line.

in para 2, you give an overall description of what happened. Here, you say that in both,there were significant changes while some areas remained unchanged.(dont need to specify the changes. these are for para 3 and 4)

in para 3 and/or 4, you find similarities and differences between the 2 maps. writie about similarities in 1 para and differences in 1 para.

or

you can write about what stayed same in 1 para and write about what changed in the next.

a conclusion isnt required if you write the overall paragraph (para 2).

Response to your writing: You referred to the maps as pictures. this may cost you some marks. examiners dont want you to change these wordings. if the question says map, then its safe to call it a map.

Your para 2 was fine, but ill suggest you to start with overall, so that the examiner knows its an overall paragraph.

In para 3 and 4, you divided the changes and what remained same between the 2 paras. you should talk about what got changed in only 1 para and what remained same in another para. its better to not mix them up.

for help with task 1, i highly recommend this youtube channel:
IELTS-up Online lessons. They break down what you need to write really well. It helped me get a 7.5 in writing. Goodluck!

Thank you for taking your time to give me such quality feedback. But I find it unbalanced if you divide 2 analyzing paragraph into writing similarities and differences. Because in this kind of task 1, the differences are usually more significant than the similarities ( I mean, there are more ideas to write about differences than similarities). So it seems your idea given to me is not really persuasive.

But still tho, you deserve to get a million thanks from me!