It doesn’t matter what kind of website you’re running - you need maps on it. Whether it’s a local business, a corporate office or just your favorite vacation spot you want to create a map in seconds with no fuss or nonsense. This is where GMW comes in. We created the plugin to be as simple and as user-friendly as possible while maintaining the flexibility and powerful options of much bigger plugins.

2 CLICKS TO CREATE A MAP
Although maps set up with GMW can be used anywhere on the site by utilizing shortcodes, they’re primarily used as widgets. Once the plugin is installed and you drag-drop the widget in a sidebar the only thing left to do is to enter the desired location. Yes, there are more than 20 extra options that you can configure, but we took special care with default values, so you don’t have to mess with anything if you don’t want to. Both thumbnail and interactive maps have 20+ custom skins available so you can match them to your site’s look & feel. A library with over 1500 pins ensures that every type of business can be adequately represented on the map, and we even included 20+ lightbox skins. Options such as map size, layers, types and languages are implied and available.

Since most users only need to show one location (pin) on a map, multiple pins are disabled by default. Again, we wanted to keep it as simple as possible for the majority of our users. If you need more than one pin, no worries, just enable that option, and you can add as many pins as needed either by entering an address or by picking it from a map. You can even choose which pins are available on the thumbnail map and which ones on the interactive one.

FASTER MAPS
Most plugins integrate maps on sites using iframes or JavaScript. Both are valid methods but take about 40 requests and upwards of 2MB of data to load. Our map thumbnails use one request not larger than a 100kb to load. How’s that possible? GMW uses Google Static Maps API, which renders the entire map as one static image. If the user needs an interactive map they just click the thumbnail and a full-blown map opens in a lightbox. If you don’t like lightboxes, it can just replace the thumbnail map. This method makes the site load much faster while users keep all map features they’re are accustomed to.

We continuously add new features to GMW as we’ve been doing for the last four years. Customer feedback is crucial to us, and most new features are user suggested ones. So, head over to the plugin’s site, install it and grab the seven days free trial license. Just try it out you won’t be disappointed.