Tuesday, July 07, 2009 at 4:30 PM
Webmaster Level: All
With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.
Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the 4th of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.
Google has made this process easy for you. By copying and pasting a single line of code, any website can offer customized door-to-door directions powered by Google Maps to their users.
The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And for those who prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.
If someone enters a vague starting address, they have the option to specify a more exact address, which will then fly into the "From" field.
Providing directions from Google Maps is very flexible; in addition to run-of-the-mill addresses, you can give your customers directions to everything from a generic ZIP code to a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates for any of your locations.
Example destinations:
123 River St, Woods, MA
90210
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W
You can also give your address an alias, or a name that everyone will understand. You can do this by putting the alias in parentheses just after the address:
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W (Grandma's House)
Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.
With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.
Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the 4th of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.
Google has made this process easy for you. By copying and pasting a single line of code, any website can offer customized door-to-door directions powered by Google Maps to their users.
The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And for those who prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.
If someone enters a vague starting address, they have the option to specify a more exact address, which will then fly into the "From" field.
Providing directions from Google Maps is very flexible; in addition to run-of-the-mill addresses, you can give your customers directions to everything from a generic ZIP code to a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates for any of your locations.
Example destinations:
123 River St, Woods, MA
90210
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W
You can also give your address an alias, or a name that everyone will understand. You can do this by putting the alias in parentheses just after the address:
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W (Grandma's House)
Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.
39 comments:
This will be a great addition to some sites. Being a webmaster, some of my clients prefer a more customized and detailed contact/map page, but there are plenty of sites where that isn't necessary, and this little tool looks perfect. Good stuff.
Great gadget - love it!
I clicked through to use it but then it's all in German!!
German? For me it was Dutch. Both languages is quite easy to understand.
But can't you paste these gadgets into Google Sites http://sites.google.com ?
For those who clicked and saw another language (I saw Brazilian Portugeuse), you can revert to English (or whatever) by changing the language preference option in the right/bottom of the gadget configuration.
Is there any chance of having this gadget offered in Google Sites?
Its a great free gadget.
The only quirk is that if a user inputs a wrong address in the "from" feild then the resulting error message is "We couldn't understand the location ... followed by your address". Users then think there is something wrong with the destination address.
I like that gadget
wow, great tool
That's great. However, I am a chiropractor in NYC will this gadget provide directions via public transportation also or only driving?
pretty useless without streets... I mean here in Bucharest, the capital of Romania there are no actual streets visible in google maps, it's like we live on the moon...
gadget looks cool though
I love it! But one thing: Please make the blue tekst "Gadgets powered by Google" editable! I have a dark blue background, and this doesn't look great at all..
I actually started using this gadget on one of my sites, but it has a few problems with it.
One is if a person doesn't have a liquid layout it will actually break the layout depending on the number of directions needed to arrive the destination. In the preview when generating the gadget it seems to have a scroll bar, but once embedded it doesn't.
The second is that there is no loading screen or error message if someone put in the wrong location. People will just keep clicking 'Go' over and over if they have little patience.
Otherwise this is a great gadget.
Google map failed me, sent me to the wrong place (opposite side of the town). I have checked it rechecked it, compared it with other maps and I found it wrong. It is really frustrating it should be checked out.
e.
I tryed using the Harvard and Legoland and both gave me this error: Missing or malformed url parameter
Even with different addresses.
Why?
My directions gadget shows __MSG_from__ and __MSG_to__ instead of From and To and Google is impossible to contact by email to report the bug.
@d3 - Try removing and re-adding the Gadget. You can also try picking a different language from the Language drop-down menu, either "English - United States" or "default language".
It works great on my company's site, but I noticed it won't show up in IE6 without a refresh after the page loads initially. With a lot of places still stuck on IE6, its a bigger issue unfortunately than it should be. I don't know if this is a general Gadget issue or this one, but I'd rather avoid having to use a message via CSS to urge people to refresh/update. Is there any fix for this?
Neat! But how do you remove the maps/directions once you're done and want to go back browsing the site/blog? Should be some kind of escape button...pressing "Go" again doesn't work.
I can't seem to get this gadget to work with Safari 4 on Mac OS X 10.5.7. Whenever I open a site with the gadget, a file named robots.txt downloads and opens. The robots.txt file says:
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://totalequinelearningcenter.synthasite.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /classes/
Disallow: /resources/
Disallow: /definitions/
Disallow: /templates/
Anyone know a fix? Thanks :)
This is a great gadget, thanks! Our only problem is that it does not seem to work in Opera (latest ver - 9.64), which is a slight problem since 9,1% of our visitors use that browser according to Analytics. Is this a temporary/known bug? Works fine in Chrome, Firefox and IE.
Unfortunately this doesn't work with UK post codes. For example 'BS16 1QY' is mangled to 'BS16 6'
Shame. This will be a great feature when it's working fully.
Hmm - sorry about this semi off-topic post. But I'm just puzzled that I can't figure out to do even obvious simple things in Google maps. Ususally Google products excel in user interface. This (imho) sucks! Let me list my gripes:
1. Custom points (positions, points of interest?) saved in "my maps" are not (and cannot be?) locked. So they are easily moved by mistake (and of course there's no undo). When moved they retain their label - just to make sure the user is fooled good ;-)
2. The "directions" tool seemingly do NOT support directions for the saved custom points. I have to type in the addresses separately??? Very, very odd!
3. The scale in the bottom left corner is in feet on top line. The km on the bottom is not readable as it's overprinted with copyright information.
I've searched for the "settings" or "options" allowing me to mate the interface usable. I can't find it :-(
So, I have to conclude: Google maps sucks for the general user! It's great that I can write APIs etc. for the excellent map material. But I feel the google.com/maps is way under "google standard" - actually more like a joke!
Cheers,
Anders (that would like to "see the light" on google maps)
Thanks for this! Is there a way to have a map displayed together with the directions? Seems to me a GoogleMap/DirectionsGadget combination would be a great addition.
I love this gadget. However, my firm requires any link that sends you outside the site to include a pop-up window with a disclaimer telling the user they are leaving our site. (stupid I know)
Can someone please give me the code to include so I can accomadate this requirement.
Thank you.
To create driving directions to a Latitude/Longitude, your posting says to use the format of:
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W (Grandma's House)
However, this does not work. After some trial and error I found this works:
42.06782,-71.756963 (Grandma's House)
I hope this helps someone else.
My previous idea didn't work. Even the article author's own example simply does not work!
If you try it, you will get:
We couldn’t understand the location 42.06782° N, 71.756963° W (Grandma's House)
So, it says you can use lat & log -- how ??????
This gadget worked on our website for quite awhile, but now is defaulting to the Googleplex address. I went back to the original gadget and put our address in the "TO" field, and the javascript code shows our correct address, but Googleplex again comes up on the live webpage. What happened? How can I fix this?
After a year of using this gadget, yesterday it just stopped working. No matter what you enter as your "to" address, when you paste the code into your site the "to" address reverts to Googleplex. Just more annoying Google 'self-promotion"? Who knows, but this tool is now useless.
We've had the gadget working for a while but now it only shows the default destination option, Googleplex. I went back and edited the code on the Google Gadget website, but it still shows the default.
What am I missing?
Help! I have added this to a webpage and when you click go after entering destinations, it does not resize. The content is there, you can view it by scrolling down inside it with the down arrow, and see the map and directions, however it is still only framed in the initial set size.
SOLVED my problem, the code needs to be running on a page on a webserver, not on a page running off my hard drive.
please!! is it possible to have this gadget for Israel as well?? who could I email to for this kind of suggestion?
Widget not expanding... don't know why? Checked with multiple browsers.
Any suggestions.
Tried all of these http://maps.google.com/help/maps/gadgets/directions/
I have used this gadget for a long time on pages like this as an example, http://www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk/map.asp?CompanyID=121006
All used to work fine, but now the page no longer expands and no scroll bar is included either.
Is there a problem with the code and if so can this gadget be updated to work in IE9 and other updated browsers?
I've been using this gadget and I just noticed it's not working in Firefox 3.6 (tried on both Windows and OSX platforms.) It was working before. Any ideas of what has happened?
This is now only working in Chrome
not FF or IE
Anybody any ideas?
I cannot figure out how to substitute a geolocation (for example if I use this script via my mobile phone) for the initial location.
I think I need to use the "navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(location)" function and substitute the lat/long into the script... but cannot figure out how to do this.
Any help is appreciated.
Dennis
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