I had a look at the number of plug-ins available but found it difficult to decide if any would do what we want. I’m hoping that someone may have just the right experience to advise me if such a plug-in exists.

We want to use an old 1900 map of the area with hotspots which will give the history of old buildings, etc. shown on the map.

I’m looking at doing it with HTML but that is a lot of work and a plug-in could be the better answer. I’m a recent user of WordPress so my knowledge is limited and I don’t think it’s sensible to download several plug-ins just to try them!

I’d be grateful for any help and advice.

You should have a look at Advanced Custom Fields Pro – it provides a way to add a google map to the WordPress admin meaning you could create a custom post type called locations and apply the map picker there. It returns a lat/lng object which you can implement on a global map.

This tutorial shows how you can do it: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/google-map/

There is a website called Snazzy Maps that lets you customise a google map. When you export styles from Snazzy Maps it saves as a jSON object so you’d just paste that into the new_map() args in example above.

While google maps can be customised, Map Box provides a much better level of customisation, including an old fashioned map – https://www.mapbox.com/gallery/. The only downside is that if you get over 100,000 API hits it costs a lot of money as opposed to Google that is basically free and offers the places API.

I have built exactly this on my own website using the ACF Pro, Google Maps API and custom code https://www.bristolblueprint.co.uk/

Thanks Staartmees – I’ll have a look at the image map, as you suggest.

Thanks WebAssembler, That sounds promising but I’ll have to read the tutorials in depth as, while I’ve got used to WordPress, plug-ins are all new to me and I’m learning as I go along.