Find Yourself with Interactive Maps
By Paul Dempsey
Most large businesses and organizations that exist not only in the virtual world, but also in the physical one, can benefit from having one or more maps on their Web sites. These maps can help customers find their way to a store location or a specific building or office. Colleges and universities, for example, generally publish a campus map to help students and visitors find their way around.
At Dickinson College, where I work as Web manager, we have a nicely painted map that shows a simulated aerial view of the campus. When the map is reproduced in print, a numeric key superimposed on it shows the locations of various buildings. When we decided to put the map on the Web, the numeric key seemed like an embarrassingly "low-tech" approach. I had in mind an interactive map that could highlight the location of buildings when the user selected them.
I should point out that I'm using the word "map" in the traditional sense of the word: a visual representation of a geographic area. You shouldn't confuse this interactive map with a site map or the HTML imagemap feature. Imagemaps let you define an area of an image, such as a circle, rectangle, or polygon. Those areas are then linked to other documents so that when a user clicks on them, the browser loads a new Web page.
An interactive map, on the other hand, is a traditional map displayed in a pop-up window. Users can select the names of buildings and locations in one part of the window, and an arrow will appear at the corresponding point on the map. An example of this setup is shown in
