Have you ever wanted to get feedback from visitors on your website? Basically gauging user’s opinions related to the interface, design style, font choices, and other similar areas. Most websites have a contact page but doesn’t provide the same result.
Thankfully there are plenty of free open source JavaScript codes for gathering user feedback. These may appear as toggle boxes at the bottom of the screen, or possibly as a modal popup window. The whole point is to catch people’s attention quickly and let them know you(the webmaster) are looking for their opinion. These free JS scripts and plugins should help you get started on the right path.
When building any map-related applications, there are many popular providers to select from like Google Maps or Bing Maps and they provide APIs for integration.
However, using an open source engine and the ability to switch providers anytime offers more freedom + flexibility.
Cesium, a
WebGL-powered JavaScript mapping library, offers just that by being provider-agnostic.
It has support for 3 different views: 3D globe, 2D map, and 2.5D Columbus View where transitioning from one to another is just a line of code.
Drawing any type of shapes, highlighting specific regions and interacting with the map using mouse or touch is pretty easy.
Cesium comes as a single JS file and work in all major browsers including mobile.
Maps are used so widely in web design and they are usually expected to be interactive when presenting data.
It can be the branches of an international company, statistics about countries or just destinations to visualize. Like said, lots of uses.
Simplemaps is a website that provides professional, highly-customizable and interactive maps built with JavaScript and SVG (or Flash).
SVG has a wide browser-support and it works very well on mobile + tablet as well.
There are maps for “world/countries, continents, USA and Canada” and the usage +customization doesn’t require advanced development knowledge. It works by simply editing a text file and a detailed, step-by-step documentation exists.
Also, Simplemaps website has an online customization tool that enables the users to edit the countries, change colors, descriptions, links and more.
Considering that the maps are in vector (SVG), tiny or huge, they work great on all sizes. And, they even come with a zoom-in functionality.
With some JavaScript, it is so easy to add new features to them like tooltips, selectable regions and much more.
To sum up, SVG maps are definitely the way to go for modern web mapsand Simplemaps has a wide range of products on the field.
P.S. For Flash fans, the website also offers similar maps in Flash with their source code.
How to join the giveaway?
Simplemaps is giving away 3 licenses (for a map of your selection).Commenting to this post is enough.
Winners will be selected on 22 April 2013 (1 week later) with the query below and announced as an update to this post.:
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=3981 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3
Good luck to all.
The winners
Here they are:
- Roshin C (comment #1260748)
- Jed (comment #1260726)
- DR (comment #1260708)
Congratulations and thanks to everyone for joining.
We usually use Google Maps with its default styles which is the most familiar one to all.
However, starting with v3 of the Google Maps API, it can be customized with ease so that the look and feel can match the website’s design.
Snazzy Maps is a website which shares many Google Maps styles freely.
There are already 20+ styles and, once clicked, the JavaScript array for the style is displayed and can be downloaded.
Grid Forms is a JavaScript-CSS framework that aims to ease data entry.
It allows us to create printed-like forms that are perfectly placed on a grid and occupy less space.
The framework comes with ready-to-use styles and they can also be customized with Sass.
Created forms are responsive and use a simple HTML structure.
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