Today I got to play around with Google Maps. If you haven't experienced Google Maps before then I suggest you get yourself on there right now. The best thing about Google Maps is that it has its own API which you can use to embed customised maps into your website.
I know a some customers already have Google Maps on their contact page showing the exact location of their offices. But, what if you have hundreds of offices and you want to show the location of all of them?
Obviously, you aren't going to want to code each individual office by hand. But, if you had a BT tool to manage the offices then a judicious use of the Google Maps API would allow you to display every one of these offices – on a single map, or each on its own map with next to no effort.
Of course, there are also much cooler applications for this kind of technology. Imagine that you wanted to give someone a virtual tour of your town complete with photos. You can embed those photos into Google Maps and provide a pre-determined route for your visitor to follow.
And while maps by themselves are pretty cool, Google Maps can also display satellite images. Off the top of my head I can think of numerous businesses who would benefit from being able to embed street maps or satellite images into their web sites including surveyors, town planners and real estate agents to name a few.
So it seems that gone are the days where you place a static image on your site with a little arrow pointing to your office. Now, embrace what Google has to offer and embed a Google Map complete with directions from the user's house and with photos of the premises so that they know exactly what they are looking for when they get there.
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