Using Your Own Floorplan, Seating Plan or Guide Map as the Visitor Map

A satellite map is the right map for a campus, a festival field or a business park: the buildings are where the visitor sees them and the car parks look like car parks. It is the wrong map for a stadium, where nobody navigates by the shape of the roof, and for anything indoors, where the roof is all a satellite can see. Those places already have a map: the seating plan on the ticket, the hall plan in the exhibitor pack, the estates site plan on the hospital signs, the illustrated map the gardens sell at the kiosk. The job is to make that map do what a phone map does.

What an uploaded plan gives you

In the Signposted builder you can swap the real map for a picture of your own: a JPG or PNG of the plan, around 4000 pixels on the long side. It becomes the base map. Visitors pinch to zoom and drag around it exactly as they would the satellite view, the pins sit on it at the places you dragged them to, trails draw their dashed route across it, and the "I am a…" audiences filter it in the same way. Everything else on the page is unchanged: the places list, the events, the people, the enquiry form and the QR code.

What you lose is directions. A plan has no coordinates, so there is no walking route from the blue dot to a pin; instead the card tells the visitor which gate or which entrance, and a trail walks them there stop by stop. For a site where the question is "which block, which gate, which bar" rather than "which road", that is the better answer anyway.

Stadiums and arenas

The seating plan is the one map every supporter has already seen. Pin the gates, each with the blocks it serves and the time the turnstiles open; the stands and the blocks visitors ask about most, such as the away section and the family enclosure; the bars, the food, the toilets and the first-aid rooms on the concourse; and the accessible platforms with how to reach them step-free. Add a home-supporter, an away-supporter, an accessible and a hospitality audience, and a trail from the blue-badge bays to the platform. Our Avon Arena demo is exactly this, built on a plan we drew for a fictional 40,000-seat ground.

Exhibition halls and conference venues

The hall plan from the exhibitor pack, with the stands drawn on, is the map a delegate needs on the day. Pin the registration desk, the theatres and the catering points, give exhibitors their own audience with the loading bay, the build-up times and the organiser's office, and update the plan when the layout changes: replace the picture and the pins stay where they are.

Hospitals and large buildings

A hospital estate is often better served by the site plan the signs are drawn from than by a satellite view of flat roofs: the entrances have names, the car parks have letters and the plan matches what is printed on the appointment letter. For one large building, a floor plan works the same way, with a pin on each department and a note of the floor. More on Signposted for healthcare sites.

Attractions, gardens and holiday parks

If you already pay an illustrator for the pretty map on the leaflet, use it. It is the map visitors recognise, it is on brand, and on a phone it gains the things paper cannot do: tap a highlight for the story and a photo, follow the one-hour trail, filter for toilets and picnic spots, and look inside the glasshouse with a 360 tour. A holiday park plan with the lodge numbers on it becomes the week-long map for every guest.

Adding 360 tours to a plan

Any place can carry a 360 Studio or Matterport tour whichever map you use. The pin gets a 360 badge so visitors can see at a glance which rooms they can look inside, and a "Look inside" button on the card opens the tour on the page. On a seating plan that means a view from the block before the ticket is bought; on a hospital plan, the ward or the day-surgery unit before the visit; on a gardens map, the house that is closed on Mondays. The Ridgeway College demo shows the badge on a school chapel and a science block.

Getting the plan right

Export at a decent size, 3000 to 4000 pixels on the long side, so block numbers stay readable when zoomed. Crop to the site: white margins waste the phone screen. Keep the labels on the plan to the fixed things (stands, gates, car parks) and put the changeable things (today's closures, the pop-up bar) in pins, which you can move and edit in a minute. If you have no plan at all, a satellite view with areas drawn over it is a good start, and we can draw a plan for you from the architect's drawings or the ticketing map.