At the end of 2009, Toyota Motor Europe decided to create a pilot website which would be entirely optimized for mobile devices. The goal was to create a full mobile version of our website instead of a scaled down, simplified version of the current website. Location-based services are one of the great advantages of the mobile internet, so on top of a fully database driven car configurator, we planned a Google Maps API Premier based “Dealer Finder” for the mobile site. The pilot site http://www.toyota.de/mobile/ went live on time, and all of the main site Dealer Finder applications were migrated to Google Maps successfully.
We decided to use Google Maps on both main and mobile sites for many reasons:
* Our website visitors are already familiar with Google Maps and were very comfortable with using it
* One major goal of the redesign was to increase location-based information on our website
* The Google Maps API is open, allowing us to easily customize the application when creating international websites
* Version 3 of Google Maps API Premier is especially suited to be used for mobile sites and desktop web alike
The mobile website was tested in a usability lab with very good results. We also received very positive comments on the advanced features such as the car configurator and Google Maps based Dealer Finder.
The technical point of view
The goal of the project was to provide a flexible dealer locator solution that would fully integrate with our existing back-end services and CMS. Flexibility was crucial as the service had to be reusable with minimal efforts on both Toyota websites and Lexus websites across 26 markets. Even if we made the functionality quite generic, we always have one or two markets that come with very particular requirements. On top of that, we had to implement Google Maps API in our application and roll it out across Europe in very tight time frame and a strict deadline which we could not miss.
But we made it, thanks to the several advantages that the new Google Maps API v3 provides. Also, the fact that the Google service is available in all the languages we needed saved us considerable translation work. In particular, Google Maps API Version 3 provided us with some great features:
* More object-oriented which means a nicer & more efficient code, but more importantly it made easier to integrate it with our current code.
* Fully optimized for mobile: we were working on our first mobile site at the same time and we wanted to provide our dealer search service on this new platform. Response time of the Google API is very good and it works very smoothly on mobile. By using v3, we were able to implement it very quickly in our mobile site with minimum efforts as the same back-end is used for both platforms.
Google Maps API v3 was definitely a good choice; it is very easy to use for basic functionality, and yet offers all the flexibility and features to implement complex and advanced functionality. It is highly customizable and it gives us full control on our solution. This looks very promising for the future evolution of our application and for new services. And to quote our developer, “It was fun to do this project!”
To check out an example of Toyota Europe’s Website using Google Maps API Premier version 3, visit www.toyota.fr.
Posted by Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps team
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