Clickable Maps With Great Hover Over Effects
A cool way to present directory results is to use a clickable map that makes it easier and more attractive way for your visitors to find information
I’ve seen some great examples using JQuery plugin MapHilight to create excellent hover over effects for county and state maps of the world. It has revitalized interest in using such a technique to present clickable maps at your website or blog.
Admittedly to create a great hover over effect requires attention to detail as far as plotting coordinates goes but it’s worth the effort as you can see in this demo of a clickable county map of Ireland. Failing to make really tight coordinates can produce undesired results…..that’s why It’s best to have perfect clickable map coordinates for counties and states.
However, if you want to have your own design before we even start to plot coordinates you’ll want to make a decent clickable map image and this is a task untoo itself. Tracing borders and states is a time consuming business for any webmaster. I found already made layered Photoshop Image Files of popular country maps complete with all state borders traced with guidance from Wikipedia.
There you have we have it ready made clickable maps for your website or blog, usually at 600 pixels width perfect for most web pages. The whole process of making a clickable map like this from scratch is very time consuming and can be very expensive to pay a webmaster to create this and even worse days and weeks of your own precious time if you decide to make it yourself. Plotting tight coordinates for the 130 clickable counties of the United Kingdom and Ireland would take weeks to complete. See this excellent result clickable map of the USA .
If ever you need a clickable map of PORTUGAL, EUROPE, GERMANY, FRANCE and ASIA there are some great maps to download with editable photoshop images and html code to save yourself a mountain of precious time. One last note: Joomla users can experience difficulty adding image maps to their pages, some of these maps have a solution for this proble… that’s a big relief for Joomla users that have tried and failed to add clickable maps before.
