Mountain Accommodations provides a large selection of vacation rental properties at popular ski destinations aross North America. One of our newest tools we are working on right now is the interactive lodging maps.
These flash maps allow guests to see exactly where the property they are booking is located, or allow them to search for a property visually. Several of the first maps are live on our site. The most recent map is of Fernie, BC (Canada) If anyone is interested in taking a look at the map, I would appreciate any feedback.
The map can be accessed by clicking search map at: http://www.mountainaccommodations.com/destination_fernie.php
Ian Atkinson
Technical Coordinator: Canadian Vacation Homes Ltd. & American Vacation Homes Corp.
Where do you vacation? Ski Accommodations & Waterfront Vacation Homes
I think your maps are great because they are very appealing and very user friendly. The flash maps however may not be accessible to users with older browsers/computers. How are you going to please those customers? Are you planning to redirect those users to more standard maps?
While browsing through your site, I also noticed not so friendly URLs, I suggest you ask your programmer to insert a rewrite mod to convert your sub URLs from ".php?...." to ".htm" or ".html". This will help your site rank higher on search engines on subpages as well.
You should consider creating a poll under our 'Vacation Rental Polls' forum to see how many people can or cannot view your flash maps.
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Hey John,
That is a good point, that some users do not have a flash player, however for Mountain Accom all of the photo galleries are done in flash, so for this site it is a requirement. We have a smaller Canadian Only ski site www.okchalets.com where we tried to accommodate everyone by using as little flash as possible.
Perhaps I will look at doing a static pdf version of the maps once all of the flash ones are done, so that everyone can use them.
Also I'll fwd the URL suggestion to our IT-jedi and see what we can do. Thanks for the suggestions.