A lot of people ask me how I make the maps of our travel route that are on our home page, http://www.jimandchris.com/ .  I use clipart of a map, then with a program called Fireworks I use the pen tool to draw the route. 

Most RV Travelers have a map of the states they’ve visited pasted somewhere on the outside of their RV.  Like the one in the photo upper right corner of this page.  We just love it when we visit a new state and we get to put it on our map.  But, what if you want that map on your webpage?  I’ve just run across a really cool website that let’s you do just that.  It’s called Visited States.  There’s also one called Visited Countries.  Since you’ve already seen the states we’ve visited, I’ll do the Countries:

It’s so easy.  Once you get to the website, you’ll see a list of states (or countries).  Simply check the box next to each state (or country) you’ve visited and click ‘Go’.  When it’s done, you should see the map.  Below the map is a box containing the HTML code you need to put into your webpage - just copy and paste it.

I did one more step because I didn’t like the size of the graphic - it was too big for this page.  I right-clicked on the map and used the ‘Save picture as …’ command to save the .gif file on my computer.  Then I could resize it as I saw fit and upload it to display on this page.

Note added August 2006: I found another ‘visited states’ map that I like even better at http://www.epgsoft.com/VisitedStatesMap/.  The main difference is that it colors in each state with a different color.