The other day I have registered my agency on goolge maps. It’s really easy. Just click on “Put your business on google maps” there and create a map that shows where people can find you. You need a google account to do this of course.
Once you have created a map you can claim your ownership on that business and google will confirm this with a pin and a phone call (you have othe possibilities too, by sms or 
postcard!). A few minutes later your business will appear with a clickable mark on the map once you search for your address:
In the blue bar on top right of the map you find an icon called “Link”. If you click on this, you get two html codes to link to this map:
The upper one is plain html for a pure link like the one I used in the about and contact page of this blog.
The lower one is the code for an iframe you can use to display the map directly on your website or wherever. Although iframes are not accessible and will mess up the validity of the code, I put the map on my contact page of schwindt-pr.com because it gives you a direct visual impression:
In the code of the iframe you can specify the size of the frame by changing the measures of “width” and “height”. You can also keep the “frameborder” on “0″ or make it look like a window by changing “0″ to “1px”.
This map is not static btw. but still interactive which means you can move it, zoom in and out. With the link which is automatically placed below the map you can go to google maps to see the map in a bigger view too. There you can also let google maps find the route from or to your business in relation to another place you chose.
Apparently wordpress doesn’t support iframes. At least I couldn’t implement any on my blog. But with the snapshot function of this blog the pure link is enough anyway.
What you need to know (and I didn’t when I made my first map) is that you have to chose the degree of zoom BEFORE you save your map. When I made my first one I just took what google suggested. The result was a big zoom on my street with no relation to the rest of the town. You still could have zoomed out in the result map later on but the first impression would have been “What’s that?”.
So what are your experiences with google maps? Do you find this tool helpful? And if so are you using it too?
