Questions and Quest for functional maps

[Jami]

I am looking for a 'simple' way to place a map of the US in a web page that when a person clicks on their state it zooms into a map of their state and when they click on their city same thing it zooms to a map of the city - on which I can place markers for churches and other points of interest that they can get info on like address and such.

I see variations of this idea several places on the web, but how to do it has not been an easy quest. Yes, there are google and yahoo maps api, but woh to complicated and not what I need. I never saw the US map option either. And exactly how to set up what I need was not covered in the documentation.

I found a couple of options that were very expensive....

Does anyone know of a better way to get this job done?

Not sure if this is the best place for this post, but I thought I'd start here.

Thanks

[Builder]

I don't know where to send you or how to do it. Just thinking out loud here (look above my avatar :D).

I don't know a whole lot about databases, but you're talking about a monstrous one. Just think of the hundreds of churches in each of the major cities. Now extrapolate that to other attractions. Now think about adding smaller cities. The upkeep alone on that database would be extremely daunting -- if you could even get it built in the first place. Maybe that's why you only see the big boys (Google, Yahoo, MapQuest, et al) attempting these things and why other options are so expensive.

Yeah, I know, not a lot of help... :)

Good luck,
Kevin

[Jami]

It's cool to think-out-loud :-)

But what I need to do is a very simple thing and that's my problem, all the map tools out there are WAY more than I want to get into.

I want 3 steps/clicks only process:

1. US map (with linked states)
2. Click on state takes you to state map with cities and linked markers (for churches, not all as you imagine, but just a few)
3. Click on marker takes you to street view of marker location with link for driving directions.

3 steps/click - process - and not a lot of markers.

It would be nice to have a little more bells and whistles and predone maps, but I can live without them if they come with a high price of $ and add more confusion with unnecessary information. And it would be real nice to have the final step 3 run off of a database where I could just add the info and have it plot automatically, but creating that is way to involved for this very small project. I was just hoping for a tool to jump start the whole process. Save me reinventing this wheel.



Thanks

[coldhead]

http://maps.google.com/