We suggest opening another session of your Internet browser and loading an actual Arapahoe County Internet Map. This way, as you go through the tutorial you can practice what is being explained. Getting Familiar with the Internet Map Window When you open the Arapahoe County map through your Internet browser, you will see a new window that looks like the example you see here. If you open the map window directly from the County's GIS Home Page, you will no longer see any standard Internet buttons or menus. This is done to reduce confusion, as these functions interfere with the mapping application. If you navigate to the mapping application from another direction, you may still have standard internet explorter buttons available. As a rule, when an interactive map is open don't use any of the browser buttons in Internet Explorer Directly! If you do, the link with Internet map servers may be severed. If this happens, simply close the map and re-open it. On the top of the Map Interface, you can see the Toolbar. You will use the tools to navigate, ask questions of, and change the map. Due to the increasing complexity of the toolbar, many of the advanced tools are now hidden from view when the mapping application is first opened. Pressing "Advanced Tools" will expand the toolbar to show all avaialble functions. The main window is the Map Window, where the map is displayed. Below it is the Interactive Frame where you will receive messages, and enter information for address searches. On the far right is the Table of contents/Legend Panel where you control what is visible on the map. Other functions to quickly locate specific features and the interactive map querying interface are located here as well. Avoiding Browser Problems If you see this: Our servers are searching for the map or data you requested. Please be patient, let them complete their tasks. If you click on anything while these tasks are running, the processes may be interrupted and your browser can become unresponsive. If this should happen, press the Reset Button to reset the Internet Mapping application. The speed and capacity of your computer or Internet connection have an impact on the efficiency of this application. Performance may degrade with older computers or slow modem connections. You may also experience response delays and error messages due to heavy Internet traffic. Navigating Around Maps  The Zoom tools are unique to digital maps. They are very much like using an actual magnifying glass, as the icons imply. The main difference is you can't burn ants with them. The magnifying glass with the plus sign lets you 'zoom in', while the one with the minus sign lets you 'zoom out'. There are a couple of ways to use these tools. First, select one of them, go somewhere on the map and press the left mouse button. If it is the Zoom In tool the map zooms in 50%. The center of the new map is wherever on the map you clicked the mouse button. The Zoom Out tool zooms out the same way. Second, you can zoom in more precisely by pressing the mouse button somewhere on the map, holding it down, and dragging a box. When you let go of the mouse button the map will zoom to the area defined by the box.  With an Internet map you can look at a specific area of interest. You can move around the map using the pan tool. The Pan tool lets you slide around to different parts of the map. Suppose you want to go north (up the map). Grab the Pan tool and grab (press and hold down the mouse button) onto the map and pull it down. Whatever part of the map you grab with the little hand will end up where you let go of the mouse button. Just like in real life. This works for moving any direction on the map. Click here for a relevant, but not essential, discussion of scale. Many layers or labels for layers may only appear at certain scales. This is to improve the speed of the maps and to prevent them from becoming cluttered at smaller scales. There are a few other handy buttons that will make life easier.  This button is the Zoom to Full Extent button. It zooms you out to the maximum extent of Arapahoe County.  Next is the Zoom Back Extent tool. This button jumps back to the previous map extent you were at. If you want to go back to where you were three zoom-ins ago, press it three times.  This is the Zoom Forward tool. This button returns the viewer to the map extent visible before the last use of the Zoom Back tool. This tool in effect lets you undo a zoom back function. Using this tool in conjunction with the Zoom Back tool allows you to flip between two map extents. General Performance Tips / Technical Background The new Arapahoe County Internet map service has been designed to provide users with a simple, yet powerful mapping interface and a quality cartographic product. For ease of use and general compatibility with most modern Internet browsers, the mapping application is built upon ESRI's latest ArcIMS 9.2 architecture. The viewer itself is a highly modified standard ESRI browser, built using DHTML and JavaScript. This architecture allows the browser to be quickly downloaded, and requires no special software or extensions on the your machine. To get the best performance out of the map service, the following tips are recommended: Turn off Popup Blockers Some functions, such as printing and PDF exports require opening secondary windows to display their data. Most popup blockers will prevent these images from displaying properly. Enable Cookies to save your settings. While not essential, you may enable cookies on your browser (they're usually enabled by default) to allow the browser to store your settings from session to session. Your settings such as layers on/off, map extent and others will restore if you close and reopen or reset the mapping application. Use the latest version possible of the Internet browser you are using. This system has been tested on Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7, Firefox, and Apple's Safari. While it is expected that the mapping application will work with most browsers released within the last few years, not all iterations have been tested. If you are experiencing technical difficulties, try upgrading your browser to the latest version avaialble for it. As of this release, the Opera browser and most Linux-based browsers are not supported. Keep maps simple where possible. The more layers you display on a map, the longer our servers take to render the map image. Likewise, layers with extensive annotation such as parcels or street centerlines render slower as well. Try to keep layers on the map limited to those you only need, and re-draw times will be reduced. Faster Internet connections always help. Kind of a no-brainer, but the faster your internet connection is, the faster your experience with the map broswer will be. This is especially true for initial map startup, where scripts and button images are downloaded to your PC, and during map retrieval, where map images, after they are produced, are transferred to your PC. The typical map image is only about 15Kb, but more complex ones with aerial images or extreme density of features can be over 100Kb. If you have a slow connection, and downloading a 100Kb file takes a few seconds, figure those seconds are going to be added to every map refresh as images are downloaded to your PC. Watch your screen resolution. Large monitors with high resolutions (1280 x 1024 or above, etc.) require our map servers to render much larger images. The size of your map browsing window is personal preference, just realize extremely large ones will slow updates down. Prints and PDF exports will be slower. Since prints and PDF exports generally provide images with 3 - 5 times greater visual acuity, processing times and file sizes will be larger. PDF exports with aerial images can grow to over 5MB in size. If you want to download that over a dial-up connection, be prepared to wait. Continue with Tutorial