We specialise in dynamic websites, online stores and E-newsletters.

Multimap have a new web site, and are slowly transitioning their users across to it, if you haven’t seen it aleady then it’s well worth a look - follow the “try our new site” link under the logo. The new Multimap site, the first new iteration since I left is wonderful, it’s slick, it’s left brain, it looks and feels like a Mac application or a modern 2007 web application, it’s more than a web site. The maps can be as big as you want them - my 17″ widescreen Imac was filled with Bartholemews map data, I can click and drag and pull maps around, I can save locations to access later.

The route planning has also had a major overhaul and is now cleverly split into 3 panels - an overview of the entire route, a smaller map of the starting location and a similar one of the end point. The interface in all of the sections is simply lovely, clean, and easy to use.

The exciting thing from my point of view is that we are now starting to see the site working like a true mapping application, it’s more than a web site. I can easily use the bits I want to, hide the bits I don’t, save the things I want to return to, print out the results and send them to my friends. Interestingly you’ll probably use it in a completely different manner to me, you’ll have a completely different experience and hopefully you’ll love it just as much.

In fact when Simon demo’d the site to us in a meeting last Friday I discovered so much more to the site than first meets the eye, and also there’s so much more to come, as if the Ebay mash up, point saving, and worldwide integration wasn’t enough!

They’re still transitioning to the new site so at the moment you’ll have to select the “try our new web site” under the logo (and can return to the old site at any time).

As always with Multimap and when you’re dealing with new technology and 10million users it’s sometimes a little slow or there are small glitches but overall Simon Lewis, and the team at LBi have done a fantastic job. More interestingly all the functionality on the web site, is available to Multimap business customers using their API, so if your business has an old fashioned store locator, maybe it’s time to get in touch and upgrade it to the new Multimap system, take advantage of all the fantastic new features and more importantly that beautifully slick user experience. If Apple Mac made maps this is what it would be like.

Thanks to the fact that the latest web browsers support Open Standards in certain places it means that we can develop simple little tools to make our lives easier. The OpenSearch standard allows us to create a little piece of code which tells your web browser to add a new search engine to the little search box in the top right hand corner (which normally defaults to searching Google). Well if you have Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 then opening this file will add the ability to search the php website directly from your browser (php is the code we use to make interesting web sites).

If you’re not so technically minded this file will let you do the same on the Multimap web site - give it a go, you can easily uninstall them if you don’t like them and you never know it may make your life just that little bit easier. We created these two this morning but there are a whole host of other ones at the Mycroft web site.

The internet doesn’t need much more of an explanation than this really:

Some call it web 2.0 but it’s more than that. The proof’s in the pudding.. went to www.clagnut.com (ex-colleague’s site) -> saw eleganthack.com link -> followed it -> saw this video from Kansas summarising what we (all) do online and what the web really is about -> opened up our blogging software (wordpress) -> copied the code from youtube.com into this site -> wrote this -> 5 minutes -> no techie knowledge required.

It took me back to when I was giving a training course at Multimap on XML to some of the client services team. I asked the question what happens when web pages are written in XML that any machine, program or person can interact with.. it was a rhetorical question, not any more: we’re nearly there.

Some of our customers had been asking for an enhancement to their website which would allow users to preview a page before they browsed to it - by popping up a screen shot of it as they hovered over the link. Unfortunately it never made it to the top of our “Innovation” list; although after seeing Snap’s attempt, I ‘m pretty glad it didn’t. They’ve built a really simple, elegant, easy to implement, customisable and free system that does just that.

Personally I think it’s pretty cool, although I’m not sure just how much real value it adds to a users experience, and I’m sure the usability people would have something to say because it does slightly change the way a users’ web browser works, although I wouldn’t be surprised if all web browsers have this functionality build into it in the future. In the meantime we’ve enabled it on this blog, put your mouse over a link to another web site on this page and watch the previews appear. Try this one for example.

I think it does really work for a search engine, allowing you to see what a web site looks like and contains as you search, give it a go and let us know what you think.