How To Start Making A Custom Google Map

By popular demand—by which I mean Louise suggested I do this, and I remember Matt nodding in agreement—here's a step-by-step look at how to make your own Google Map and add a location to it. (There's a lot more you can do with Google Maps than what I outline here, like making custom shapes and backgrounds and borders around things or along roads, but this should help you get started.)

1. Go to Google Maps, click the "My Maps" link, and then click "Create new map."

2. Give your map a title and set it to "Unlisted"; if your map is Unlisted, you can still embed in and send people links to it.

3. Search for a location as you otherwise would in Google Maps. I'll find College and McCaul, since that's where we have class.

4. When Google Maps finds the location you wanted it to and places the marker on the map, click that marker, which'll bring up a pop-up that looks like this:

5. Click "Save to..." and save it to your new map.

6. A little bit of text with a yellow background will come up on the top of the page confirming the save. If you want to add more locations to your map now, repeat steps 4–5; if you want to start editing those locations' descriptions and icons, click "View map."

7. When you do, you'll be spirited away to the map's individual page—which should have a list of the locations along the left side of the page, with a map alongside it. You should be able to see the location you just added on the map itself. (If you aren't seeing the markers on the map, try refreshing the page, or switch to a different browser; I've always had trouble using Google Maps in Firefox, for some reason, but Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers both work great.) Click the "edit" button.

8. If you click either the links in the sidebar, or the markers on the map, a little pop-up will appear in which you can edit the location's name, description, or icon. Spend some time playing around with what you're able to do here.

9. When you're finished, hit the "Save" button on the left-hand sidebar.

10. Then, click the "Link" link in the top-right corner of the page. That'll bring up the link for your map, if you want to share it with someone or your readers, or—better yet—give you the HTML code you'd need to copy and paste elsewhere to have the map display wherever you want.

11. If you want to see how the map will look when you embed it in a page, click "Customize and preview embedded map." That'll bring up a separate page; if you click the "Custom" button, you can input your own height and width as you want.

...and here's our map, set to 350 pixels wide, and 350 pixels tall: