The World Wide Web is increasingly a critical starting place for people looking to learn about your land trust. Most land trusts have taken advantage of that trend with Internet addresses and web sites. 

Maps can be a  very useful part of your web strategy.  For Basic users, most web mapping is done with individual image files (.jpg or .gif format picture files).  LEARN MORE about web mapping...

The following are common basic land trust web maps:

• Turf map showing where you operate - usually a simple map, emphasizing key places and the natural environment. The top images at right show basic approaches to this from the Land Trust for Central No. Carolina, and the Upper Saco Valley Land Trust.
  
• Regional map showing your holdings and other protected lands and landmarks - if it's only a portion of your web page, you may want to use a simplified version for this image (but a more detailed image if you have a popup of the map). The Androscoggin Land Trust's web site shows a simple example of this.
• Clickable image map version of your regional map. Using web-authoring or photo software, you can make key parts of your map "hotspots" where the user can click on a holding and go to a special page about it. This is easy to do for anyone with basic web building skills. 
  
• Project maps that depict each of your holdings.
• Direction maps that explain how to get to a holding or other project site.  These are sometimes best done as links to online mapping services like MapQuest, MapBlast, YahooMaps or Google Maps. These sites may allow you to save an image of the direction map they create, but these may not be of high visual quality.
  

In general, it's a very good idea to have all of your maps look similar (colors, fonts, borders, etc.) - this helps communicate your own "look and feel".

Tips for Producing Web Map Images

Map Images:  Any GIS-produced map can be made into an image for use on the web. Choose "Export" or "Save As", depending on your GIS software and capture your GIS map as a JPG or GIF file (JPGs are better for maps with many shades of colors).

Digital Images: Web maps should be in both thumbnail and full image format - clicking on the thumbnail, brings up the full size image. It's usually best to make full size images no larger than 1,000 x 1,000 pixels (fills a modern computer screen) - too large and users with smaller monitors have a hard time seeing the image.  Most photo software allows you to "save for web", creating images that are compressed in size so that they load faster.

Acrobat:  If you want to provide a high quality image for your viewers to download and print, create an Adobe Acrobat file. Most graphic designers can do this for you - the Acrobat software is very useful but can be expensive. Your image editing software (Photoshop, etc.) may have this ability built in. Acrobat files can be very large (print quality) or relatively small (screen quality) - it helps to give web viewers options to download either. Always note the file size, so that people can tell which version is appropriate to their Internet connection.

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