Gulf Shores Beach Accesses

The map above is revised from my Google Map showing the Public Beach Accesses for the City of Gulf Shores, Alabama created in the spring. It consists of an initial map showing the beach area and eight markers with a table below with information on the marker locations. I used a "bottom bar" style table rather than a side bar because of the width required of the map to show all of the beach accesses. The users can click on the marker to see the name of the access, number of parking spaces, and a short description of the access in an information window or click on the corresponding link in the table to zoom in for a closer look at the area with the hybrid satellite view. Semi-transparent light blue polygons show the boundary of public lands at each beach access and associated parking areas.

This design of the map was the model for several Gulf Shores/Google mashups created after the spring course. The City's web site now has a map of City Facilities, City Parks, as well as another version of this map in the visitors section of showing Beach Accesses with parking. I tried to create a pop-up that would display a "Public Beach" tooltip during a mouseover of the blue polygons but determined that this would require a significant amount of work. I wanted to explore using both polygons (for zoning districts) and polylines (for accurate local streets), but the difficulties in adding labels or tooltips means that I need to look for another solution. Since Google Maps supports KML data and I know you can label polygons and polyline in Google Earth, I will look into that possibility. Maybe reading data from a relational database will also open up more options.

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