Best shipping resources strategy?

[White Stormy]

I've played 1800 to the end game a few times, however thing usually end up the same. Carefully organize resources between islands start out neat and clean, then eventually things become a jumbled mess of dozens of trade routes carrying a half dozen different items and it's nearly impossible to figure out what is needed where. Just wondering if there is a preferred strategy to keep things flowing smoothly. I figure it's better to spread out production so they don't get maxed out and get wasted and so that there is a trickle of supplies getting to islands. However is it better to just have one island producing, i.e. "beer island" and "coffee island", or sending said supplies to one hub for distribution or have ships load up with just a single resource and take that to several islands? Not sure if I should trash everything and reorganize.

[kmmacman]

Here's a tip I use that works well for me. I label every trade route as follows.
First I do rename islands as you have stated above, beer, coffee, etc or at least names that are familiar.
Since most routes are going or coming from a main island to or from a supply island I name my routes Island name <- Island name or Island name -> Island name, the arrow being to and from indicators. Ex: CFs <- Beer Island, CFs -> Steel Island.
This keeps all Crown Falls routes in one group, OW main island in one group and so on.
All Oil cargo ships are label starting with a capital O island -> island, now all oil cargo ships are in one grouping on the Routes screen. Since that screen is in alphabetical order it's a lot easier to find ships and spot repeated cargo loads.
I have also used the one hub island you mentioned, labeled it Amazon, it worked pretty well in the New World region. Shipped OW and Cape T items to Amazon and distribute from there to other island in the NW region.
Bottom line your the Shipping Manager and need to find a system your comfortable with and tells you what 's going on. I just found that narrowing the trade route names helped me.
Hope you found something useful in this post.