Many organisations are finding maps and spatial apps to be an effective way to communicate with partners, customers and the public. ArcGIS Online is well suited to supporting this use case. Using this scalable, hosted system you can be confident that your maps will remain accessible regardless of demand and even if the usage exceeds your expectation there won’t be an impact on your internal GIS capabilities.
The ArcGIS Online templates let you share your maps via a library of different interfaces. Some of these also lend themselves to being embedded within a webpage; such as the basic map used by the International Hydropower Association and the storymap, as seen in this article in the Telegraph. Using the hosted templates is a quick and efficient approach, but if you do require a custom interface this can be developed using the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. The ArcGIS Online templates use this and can be downloaded as a starting point. The census maps provided by National Records for Scotland and this interactive map from the World Resource Institute both use the JavaScript API to present ArcGIS Online maps. Later this year we will have another way to tackle this when the Web App Builder is released. There was a sneak peak of the beta version in the plenary session of our user conference (the demo starts at about 11 minutes in the recording).
If you have several maps or apps that you’d like to show as a group there are a couple of ways you can do this. ArcGIS Online has a gallery application template, which lets you choose a suitable layout, that can be used as a self contained webpage. Alternatively you can embed a map gallery in your website, as we’ve done here. You can read more about how to do this in this blog article.