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πŸ“Œ An interactive map for your website

Published 23 days agoΒ β€’Β 2 min read

Hi friends πŸ‘‹πŸ»

This week I have another fun website feature to share from a recent project.

But first, a quick πŸ“£ announcement: I'll be at WordCamp US here in Portland, OR this week (Aug 27-29) I'm excited to be around a bunch of other people who are excited about WordPress too!! If you'll be there too and want to meet up IRL, email me or shoot me a message on LinkedIn.

Now back to this week's email ...

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

When location is an important part of your content

I've written before about when it makes sense to develop custom content types for your website content ... types like "stories" and "resources". You can find one of those recent emails here.

A couple of signs that your content might be ready for a custom content type:

  • You have a bunch of URLs / content pieces that all share a common set of fields or metadata
  • Grouping that content together and enabling browsing, filtering, and searching would be a good user experience

Story and resource libraries are two common examples for nonprofit websites.

And today I want to share another example: content that has location data.

Earlier this year I worked on a website refresh with TennGreen Land Conservancy whose work is all about protecting and conserving land in Tennessee.

Each successful "Project" doesn't just have photos, a description, and a category – it also has location data. And because of the geographic nature of the organization's work, displaying projects on a map is a great way to allow website visitors to visualize and interact with TennGreen's work.

​Check out a quick preview video here:

Behind the scenes, we developed a custom content type for "Projects" that contains latitude and longitude data to position the project on the map (powered by Google's Maps API) along with a host of other data fields to build the detail page for each individual project.

This type of map presentation is a good fit for pieces of content that have a specific location. You could build something similar for an organization that needed to display specific locations and make it easy for users to click through to directions to the location.

Other location data doesn't have specific coordinates – it might be state-specific instead. Many advocacy organizations need to display online action opportunities by state or congressional district.

Hopefully this gets your gears turning about how you could add interactive map content to your website!

Until next time ✨

β€” Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

​

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Blue Hills Digital

Ed Harris

A guide for nonprofit communications professionals & mission-driven marketers. Delivered weekly, by email.

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