See How Easily You can Embed a Map into Your Site%

Embedding Beautiful Maps on your Site or Blog Pages

Did you ever want to place one of those cool maps on your site or blog? Say for example if you have an event going on, or want to give directions to your house, or want to show where something happened that you are describing. Well, there are several really easy ways that you can use to give your pages that polished look. They use many of the popular internet mapping services along with varying degrees of know-how to get the maps from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft straight into your pages.

I’ll take a look at a few.

Google Maps

Let’s start at the top; the king of the heap, Google Maps. You know ‘em, you love ‘em. Speed, beauty, detail, elegance, it’s all there. Well, the good news is, they provide the best combination of Ease of Use and Functionality of all the contenders when it comes to easily embedding a nice functional map on your site or blog.

Here is an embedded Google map:

View Larger Map

This is quick, simple and nice. Once again, Google does it right.

The image below shows the steps to getting the “Embed” code for your map.

Get your map set up
Click the Embed link and copy the code from the field
Paste this code into your page and you’re done

Ask City Maps

Ask.com has a really nice mapping tool. I like their built in features for annotating the area that you have mapped. It also does a nice job of leveraging local business listing.

Here is an embedded Ask City Map:

Easy to embed, but it lacks the live in-line zooming and dragging that the Google map has. It’s really just an image with a link that goes to the Ask map page. The obvious drawback is that it brings users away from your page.

The Ask maps have some really great features for annotating the maps, so when the user get’s to the page, you can show them exactly what they need to see.

The image below shows the steps to getting the “Embed” code for your map.

Get your map set up
Click the Embed link and copy the code from the field
Paste this code into your page and you’re done

Microsoft Live Search Maps

The Microsoft Live Search Maps have some pretty cool features. Try the Birdseye view of your map (really cool). The maps do not come with a simple,convenient “Embed “option like Google or Ask.com, so you’ll have to do a little work. I have been using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer tool to compose and upload my blog posts recently. It has a lot of nice features built in, including the ability to easily embed a Live Search Map into your posts. The tool is free and it works pretty well. Definitely a helpful tool for composing posts off line.

Here is an embedded Microsoft Live Map:

This process is flaky as you can see. Sometimes the maps appear, sometimes they don’t.

Here are some instructions on using the Windows Live Writer tool to embed a Microsoft Live Search Map.

Place the cursor at the location in your post where the map will be embedded
Click the Insert Map link from the Inser tools area
A pop-up window opens
Configure your map
Click the Insert button

Yahoo Maps

I absolutely love the Yahoo maps interface. The Flash interface has some really slick features that even outshine Google. Now for the bad news, Yahoo Maps are a little more complicated. They don’t have any “Embed” option on the maps. You have to obtain and use an API key, paste javascript code and stylesheet code into your site, and then recite some magical incantations aloud before the maps will show up on your pages.

There are instructions for embedding a Yahoo map on Yahoo’s developer site.

How is the defacto term for looking up directions on the internet still the worst possible way to actually do this? Can’t I just say. “I’ll Google Maps it”?

Mapquest Maps

Terrible Maps, No ability to embed, Disaterous interface. How is the defacto term for looking up directions on the internet still the worst possible way to actually do this? Can’t I just say. “I’ll Google Maps it”?

Please, just give up and go home!

Oh, did I forget to mention, They’re an AOL property. No wonder they suck.

Solid Third Party Options

Wayfaring: You can use this site to create, customized Google Maps and embed them on your pages. They also allow others to contribute to the map. Pretty cool.

Map-Generator.net: Set up the Google Map and get the “Embed” code for your page.

by Translation

MyMapsPlus.com: Another Google Maps tool that lets you set up and grab the embed code.

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