Interactive Map Ideas?

[andrewsellenrick]

Hey everyone, I’m working on a website and am going to be creating an interactive map of the United States. The idea is that when you click a state corresponding information will be displayed. All the data will be coming from WP. I know that I am fully able to make this in flash but am wondering if I could create the same thing in HTML, Javascript, CSS, ect. If I go the html route I think that the extra information that I would have in an unordered list for each state would help my site get more hits? There really is a need for a great/easy map solution on the web. I have looked all over and the closest things I have found were someone placing points on a map (not what I need), and someone who used an image map to map out each of the 50 states (image maps seem so old school). The biggest issue I can think of in a javascript/html map is the fact the the state images would overlap causing issues with hit areas. I’m not sure if anyone has any great ideas?

[TT_Mark]

As part of my dissertation I had a (somewhat horrific) go at using SVG coupled with JQuery to create an interactive map of my university. It does most of the things you are looking for, loads data from a DB as JSON and then displays it when hovering over certain areas. You can also change the colour of different areas etc in response to interaction from the user.

It doesn’t work brilliantly in IE because I ran out of time, but you can check it out here

http://homepages.shu.ac.uk/~msinkins/

It uses Keith Wood’s JQuery SVG library which you can find through Google.

Let me know if you need any more help

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