Learn website design for tourism

Maps: The quickest solution is to pay for a link to an online street directory, displaying your location. Such a map can be integrated into your webpage or displayed in a popup window. But, if you want to draw up your own map, you might find what you're looking for in a Google image search, using keywords "map" and your location.

Ideally, the map will show the town's proximity to one or more state capitals and/or other regional centres, combined with a close-up map, showing the streets of the town itself, your exact location, as well as a few local tourist attractions, e.g. the beach, the look-out, etc.

When you've cropped and sized your map to suit the page layout, you need to save it as a gif, i.e. "map.gif". Name the file after a nearby tourist destination, to give search engines a keyword to associate with the webpage. Your image editing programme probably has a "Save for Web" option that sets the correct resolution. If not, set it at 72 dpi. If you have the option to set the compression quality, select medium (or 30%). This reduces the file size, while maintaining image quality at an acceptable level.

A frame can really enhance an image, so when you insert the map into the web page, give it a dark border of one or two pixels. It's also a good idea to include an alt tag, describing the map. For example:

<IMG SRC="map.jpg" HEIGHT="200" WIDTH="300" alt="Map of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney." BORDER="2">

This provides search engines with another source of content for indexing your web page and increases the likelyhood of being found via a Google Image Search.

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