A web application for creating online tours
MapsAlive is a web application that allows you to make your online maps come alive by turning them into interactive tours. A web application is like a desktop program except that it runs in your browser and you don’t have to download or install any software. It’s available here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anywhere in the world. It’s always up to date and you never have to pay for upgrades.
A do-it-yourself web tool
MapsAlive is a do-it-yourself tool. You don't have to send us anything or wait for us to do anything. You upload images and put your tour together yourself. When you publish your tour, it becomes available on the web instantly! You can give the tour's URL to anyone you like and they can see your tour right away. To learn more, see our How it works page.
A way to add interactive maps to your web site
The tour that MapsAlive builds is actually a mini web site with its own URL. Whenever you make changes to your tour and build it again, MapsAlive updates the tour’s web pages so that anyone visiting your tour will see the changes immediately. You can use the tour as a stand-alone web site, or if you already have your own web site, you can use the tour’s URL as a link from your site like this: tour.mapsalive.com/417. You can even have a MapsAlive tour appear within a page on your web site like you see below:
Interactive tour of the White House (first floor), Washington D.C.
The tour above is embedded in this page. Mouse over the blue arrows to see it work. Learn how you can embed tours in your web site in our Geek to Geek page. It's easy!
Terminology: tours, pages, maps, markers and slides
As you start using MapsAlive, you'll begin to see terminology that might be confusing at first, but it's really very simple. Here are some definitions to help you:
Tour: A collection of web pages and other files that make up a mini web site.
Page: A single web page containing a map and the photos and text associated with it. The pages in a typical house tour might be First Floor, Second Floor, Yard, and Neighborhood. One way to think of a page is as a destination on your tour. On a tour of Europe, one destination might be Rome. In a tour of a house, one destination might be the first floor.
Map: Any image such as a floor plan, street map, or diagram that is used to represent something in the real world. With MapsAlive, any image can be a map!
Slide: A combination of a title, a photo, and descriptive text (kind of like a PowerPoint slide) that is associated with a particular location on a map. So if a page is like a destination on your tour, a slide is like a point of interest at that destination. Using the European tour example, once at your destination of Rome, one slide might be of the Colosseum. On a house tour, at your destination of First Floor, one slide might be of the kitchen.
Marker: A symbol such as an arrow positioned on a map to indicate where a slide is located (like the familiar "You are here" arrow you see on a map of the mall).
Image: A generic term for any "picture" used for either a map on a page or a photo on a slide. From a computer's perspective an image is just a file containing graphic data be it for a floor plan or a mountain view.