Shannon-Rose has a lot of experience with byway and tourism web sites, including www.LakestoLocks.com, www.VisitAlleghenyPartners.com, and www.VisitMontgomeryCountyNY.com, and now with a couple sites like this on the horizon, we’ve got them on the brain.

Lakes to Locks interactive map.

When you’re building web sites for clients who are in the business of tourism and recreation, certain elements come into play over and over. These include interactive tools like trip planners and calendars; extensive photography and information on recreation, history, culture, and points of interest; and, most especially, interactive maps. We definitely know how to build interactive maps.

Screenshot of Montgomery County NY website

Visitors come to tourism web sites because they want to visit a place, but they need to know more about it: where to go, what to do, where to stay, and more. How a web site functions in this situation is to provide potential visitors with a resource, while supporting local businesses. The more functional and interactive a site is, the more visitors will be equipped to enjoy their stay, uncover information organically, and generally find the site useful and fun. This is a priceless impression to make when you’re soliciting business that is based on having a good time.

Understanding the basic purpose of these sites leads us to certain solutions. And, where there’s a brilliant web solution, there are programming technologies to support it. (And the brilliant minds who write the code.)

Enter AJAX, a suite of web development techniques that essentially combines JavaScript with XML. It’s taking methods that aren’t new themselves and grouping them into a method that is new—and has a lot of benefits. AJAX programming enables web developers to create interactive web applications on sites. The “asynchronous” retrieval of information from the site’s server means only the information that needs to be updated on the page will be reloaded, without having to refresh the entire page. In lay-person’s terms: it’s sleek, it feels faster and more responsive, and users have access to large amounts of data quickly and without having to reload the page. Specifically with interactive maps we build, we use AJAX with Flash. Visit a site we built: www.visitmontgomerycountyny.com.

If you’ve used Gmail or Google Calendar, you’ve used AJAX. You can see this in the Montgomery County Calendar. By clicking on an event within the calendar, an overlay appears with information about that event—without reloading the rest of the page.

Example of overlay in Montgomery County NY interactive Events Calendar.

Tags:   AJAX · Flash · Flash Website development · interactive map · Saratoga Springs NY · Tourism · tourism Website development · web design · Web Development