For most of the sites I have built I use Google Maps to indicate where the organisations are located. This method was very simple to do and immensely valuable to users and web developers, it was a free service and Google had a simple method for handling it. It was also very popular.
Then it all changed
I suppose if you are offering a free service for a long time and get absolutely no benefit from it, it is inevitable that someone will wake up and start charging for the service.
If you do a search on “embedding google maps” you will find lots of references to methods that were simple, but no longer available. You will also find lots of complaints about Google maps getting very complicated. An often quoted response is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Google updated the old interface and any maps on older sites now look different, but they still carry the same information thankfully. The only problem is that you cannot make them any more. You have to use the new systems. If all you are trying to do is show a location (in other words not for commercial purposes), then it presents a major problem. You can no longer control the zoom level, it simply zooms right in close. Which loses the context of the area.
Here is an example below for High Wycombe. This was created using Google MyMaps. Here I have created a map with a pointer and then embedded it into this page. (Basically what I do on your contact us pages).
Here is link to the page: Custom Map for High Wycombe Railway Station and here is the same map embedded into this page.
You can see that the new map is pretty useless. You have to manually zoom out for context of the location. I spent four hours trying to figure out how to get some better control over the map doing lots of research and coming back with the same story. Most people had given up and tried alternative methods. In the new version of my maps you cannot control the zoom function within the code.
However following a flash of inspiration from a fine single malt, I realised that if I put more points on the page, in fact off of the page some distance away, then I can control the zoom level because Google cannot display all of them at the same time.
Here is the same map with a second marker added in Bourne End (around 8 miles away).
This is much more informative as I can now set a default view that forces the image to be displayed zoomed out.
So if you want to carry on using Google Maps then put more than one pin in the map, then centre it on what you want people to see. If you want to use multiple pins and layers, then you will not have this problem, but most people want to use it to show a single location.
Post comment note:
(Dec 2015) I am not sure whether there was a short period when everything was broken when I wrote this, since this time there is a zoom level option when creating a Google Map, this sets how much of the map can be seen. So this problem is resolved now. You do not need to add another point on the map.