I’ve been somewhat quiet of late, which as usual means busy, busy, busy. And without further ado, the fruits of my labour can be found at Multimap.com. There’s a subtle redesign with big usability improvements for the map controls and associated functionality. We’ve also integrated Google text ads into our local information service, which I personally hope will do well so we can ditch the pop-ups (sorry) and lose some of remaining intrusive banner ads.
But that’s not the exciting stuff. The best bit from my perspective is a complete rebuild of the mapping side of the site using Web standards, semantic HTML and CSS layout. In fairness the old site validated, but we still had two prime drivers for the move to CSS and meaningful mark-up: ease of maintenance and bandwidth reduction. Of course we also got better accessibility and search engine placement for free.
The development process was definitely quicker using Web standards, in fact the idea of rebuilding Multimap.com with its old nested tables fills me with horror! I had the common templates built in two days, with a further day of tweaking to fix some minor display issues here and there. After that it was just a case of rebuilding the remaining bits of the site in the same mold, a job made easy because of the simple, meaningful mark-up used throughout.
Russ Weakley has the scoop on all this with Ten questions for Richard Rutter in which he grills me on liquid layouts, scaling images, access keys, ems and the Multimap rebuild process. Fame at last!
Note: if you have any compliments or criticisms about the Multimap redesign/rebuild, please could you also email them to info@multimap.com so that the whole team can see them. That way if it’s a compliment, I get a gold star and if it’s a criticism it goes into a bug system and will be addressed. Many thanks.
Joel wrote:
The US map seems to be wrong, the location of the orange dots don’t seem to match the city names
Simon Jessey wrote:
I’ve been looking around the new site, and I have to say that I think it is an impressive piece of work. It has certainly come a long way since I first used it years ago. I now see it as a serious competitor to the popular US map sites.
The new markup and CSS is very good, and I didn’t find any errors in my little walkabout. Nice job, Richard!
Brennan Stehling wrote:
I just pulled up your site from a link from Web Standards Group and I am having trouble with the font.
font-family: “Lucida Bright”,Lucidabright,Georgia,”Bitstream Vera Serif”,serif;
I am using WinXP and either I do not have the font you specify or it is just ugly out it is displayed. Normally I would stay with something safe like Helvetica, Verdana or Arial. Why did you choose these fonts? Have you seen how they working various browsers? I have tried it both IE 6 and Firefox 0.9.1.
Oh, but now that I scroll down I see that I can check a radio button to change the typeface. Still, I find the default unreadable.
Tim Parkin wrote:
WOW! I like the site lots and under the hood is great. BUT what really blows me away is the picture view with a window showing the map. THAT has to be the biggest step I’ve seen in maps. To see not only where you’re going but to be able to get an idea of what the locality looks like and what that big area without streets actually is is fantastic.. I’m going to play looking at all the places I used to live
Adam Bramwell wrote:
Great interview Richard, It’s especially good to see a real world approach to accessibility issues such as accesskeys. It’s politically correct to code to best practice in accessibility, but it can be taken too far than is practical.
John Kaye wrote:
A great improvement to the Multimap site, congratulations! It loads and operates so much faster now. The user experience is much improved.
An inspiration (I’ve got a site that needs this kind of work…)
Julian wrote:
Sorry to be the voice of negativity Richard but that mouse-over map on the aerial photos is bl**dy horrible – can it be toggled and be off by default?
On the plus side, good moves on the acessibility front- any plans to look at using svg for the maps in the future?
cheers
J.
Rich wrote:
Julian – thanks for the feedback. Out of the comments so far, it seems you and Tim have rather polarised views on the map overlay. Why is it so horrible in your eyes?
Rich wrote:
We’ve been looking at SVG (and other vector platforms such as Flash) on and off for a few years. We’d love to offer that sort of service, but we haven’t found a data provider who is willing to offer up the vectorised data we’d need for such implementations (even though they have it already).
Adam wrote:
Brilliant and great to see a webservice properlly running wityh web standards rather than championing it for it’s own sake. Real world examples are so important and good ones like that are even better.
Vivek wrote:
I am very happy that multimap now provides XHTML pages rather than pages that are not even well formed.
I would also appretiate if they used something like XML and CSS rather than using HTML and CSS. Using XML you can target a varity of client device (getting my idea).
I am also interested in knowing if multimap is soon going to provide any WebServices based interface. You could provide something like that Google and Amazon provide with respect to web services and someting with a 30day lic key to be sent with every SOAP Request.
Julian wrote:
OK, maybe horrible was a bit strong and on reflection it is useful to have the map overlay. Just a bit of a shock to have it follow yr mouse about when yr trying to point on the aerial map ;-) I think a toggle on/off would be best solution.
re svg – is the lack of willingness to release vectorised data a issue do you think? If so, I’m saddened because it will effectively preclude local governement websites from using vector-based GIS presentation :-(
Vivek wrote:
So is there going to be a free (time trial) web service provided by multimap.
If there is going to be one I would love to write a j2me client for my n6600.
Rich wrote:
Vivek – Multimap does already offer an XML service for its maps, searching and travel directions. Please see Multimap’s business services for instructions on setting up a free trial.