New to Web Mapping? Get started with Google’s Mapping APIs

If you have no experience with web mapping, but have some basic website-building experience, you can begin to make interactive web maps fairly easily using Google’s mapping application programming interfaces (APIs).

Google’s map API page shows you the available APIs for you to use. If you are looking to make maps like those you often see depicting store locations or basic points-on-a-map pages, check out the JavaScript API. There are many tutorials out there to help you get started with mapping, however all of them assume you are familiar with hosting your own web pages. If you’re not sure how to host your own pages, you can still get started with web mapping by using the My Maps functionality of Google Maps.

There are also several other JavaScript-based APIs for mapping, such as OpenLayers, Mapstraction, and ESRI’s JS API. All of these will allow you to embed maps with custom content into your own web pages, however each one has a different learning curve and provide different base maps out of the box.