For many website owners it could be helpful to have a link to different geometric areas of the world or of their territory, whether it be for location specific information, sales of products or types of a directory. A visual graphic like a map with areas that are clickable would be the right idea. Visitors can be presented with a clickable map of Europe rather than a bunch of links or a dropdown menu for Europe.
For a webmaster to make such an application it takes time and care but the results will look impressive and give the website a touch of class. Even Joomla owners can now have clickable maps quickly and easily
First you need to find the correct size of map, either by scanning and reducing to desired size and then working to make it clear and colorful in a decent image editor. That includes enhancing the boundaries of the states that you will eventually make clickable.
Next, the difficult part is to import the map image into a html editor or some map editing software that is capable of drawing hotspots upon the image and in turn make these hotspots into readable coordinates within the html code and when that is done each region will be clickable when presented in the browser.
Each clickable region can hyperlink to an url of your choice so for a clickable county map of the Ireland for example can link to an informative page for your visitors when they choose Dublin, Derry, Galway and Cork etc etc Great for sending visitors to images or your affiliate links or regional news as another example.
Of course all this work to make a clickable map is too time consuming or probably unfathomable for some people without knowledge of making websites but the vast majority know how to add hyperlinks.
You can find ready made clickable maps of Europeat clickablemaps.com or the webmaster can make one just for you. Clickable maps of Europe, UK, USA and ASIA are all available and with the new MapHilight JQuery Plugin by David Lynch. Now that would save time and a nice idea too.