Remote Sensing Tools

With the embedding capability for publishing Google Maps, a common need for publishing a Google Map might be to provide the following:

• Address information for a business location, or several locations
  • Providing directions to or from a business location
• Displaying a route of destination-points for a trip or tour
• Displaying points of interest you’ve visited

This is done by adding Placemarks in Google Maps. From there, you can publish this information to your Web page to make it easier for your readers to gain not only a contextually rich visualization, or detailed directions, but have them displayed with a variety of visualization options [eg: Taffic (when available), Map, Satellite, and Hybrid].

Whether you’re using the Google Maps Quicktag Plugin for Wordpress or not, isn’t really important. All the plugin does is tie-in Google Maps to the WordPress editor, making it more convenient in publishing.

Creating a New Map in My Maps

1. Log-in to your Google account, or create a new account.
2. In Google Maps, click the My Maps tab. This will open the My Maps interface, where you can now begin to create a custom map.
3. Click the Create a new map link. This will open new options for your map’s content.
4. Here, you can enter in a Title for your map, as well as a Description.
5. When you’re done editing these options, just click the Save button.

Adding a Placemark

The process is really simple to add placemarks to any location. This is a better general way of getting a location fast based on an address search, and then adding a placemark to associate with it.

1. First, do a search for the address you wish to create a placemark for. This will automatically add a green arrow to show you the location.
2. Zoom-in close and double-check that the location is correct. You can toggle back and forth between the Satellite view to see how accurate it is contextually on the map. Sometimes, but very rarely, the address data is slightly off by one address. This isn’t that common, but it’s always good to double-check the location anyway just in case. (This isn’t unique to Google Maps — it’s actually in all of the online mapping apps (and basically all other mapping apps!). I won’t bother getting into the cause of the issue because it goes back to the raw address data provided by government census.)
3. Now, right-click on the green arrow and in the menu, click Add a placemark. A placemark will appear, and the editing bubble will also appear ready for your input.
4. Enter all the information you wish to include. Placemark Title, Address information, pictures if you wish, etc. You can additionally add things like small images, links to web-sites, and you can also edit the HTML if you click the Edit HTML button.
5. When you’re done, click OK and then Save, and your Google Map will be updated and saved.
6. When you’re done editing your placemark, right-click on the green arrow and in the menu, click Clear search results. This eliminates the green arrow from the map, and you’re left with the placemark you added.
7. Make sure you click Save again when you’re done to update your map.

That’s basically it! Do another search for an address and run through those steps again. Add as many placemarks as you need.

Once your map is finalized and saved, simply click the Link to this page link and copy the code provided to embed the map into your web page. Or, chose the Customize and preview embedded map option to change the size of the map as well, and copy the provided code there.

To embed, simply paste the code you copied into your web page, and that’s it. You should now have your Google Map embedded on your web page!

Optional KML

Keep in mind that you can optionally provide the same map for viewing in Google Earth. Simply copy the KML link provided by Google Maps, and include that as a link on your web page as well! Now you have the best of both worlds (pun intended).