Deciding when, where and how to integrate or display a map on your site is the first step, the second should be what technology and illustrations to use.

If you’re all about interaction, JQuery, Ajax, or Flash are all effective technologies that hold their own ground.

Map illustrations are a dime a dozen however, a strong and balanced display of graphics, information, and colors is what makes an infographic stand out and reach its target audience effectively.

As designers, we’re constantly searching for ways to improve and style our designs, this is exactly what the following 30 infographics and sites display below; the breaking of rules.

Sites with Interactive Maps

Illustrative Infographics

Compiled exclusively for WDD by Liz Fulghum.

Did we miss any great examples? Please post them in the comments’ area below…

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: V8zN5Z

Instead of pouring over figures and long reports to decipher data, an infographic can immediately make apparent exactly what a dataset actually means.

Below are more than 25 infographics that can be useful to web designers.

Some are incredibly practical, some provide information that might be of interest to designers and some just present data that might be interesting to those who design websites all day.

If you know of any good ones that we may have missed, please add them in the comments section below.

1. Web Trend Map 4

2. Period Table of Typefaces

3. Global Internet Traffic Map

4. Classifying Experiences

5. Flickr User Model

6. The Browser Wars

7. A Month of Spam

8. The Life of an Article on the Web

9. Online Communities Map

10. Map of the World 2.0 Mosaic

11. The Internet’s Undersea World

12. Search Engine Spider Traps

13. Google PageRank Explained

14. Building a Company with Social Media

15. SEO Check List

16. The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits—to You

17. Software Wars

18. Who Participates Online

19. What 16 Million Colors Looks Like

20. Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

21. Periodic Table of the Internet

22. Country Codes of the World

23. Apple’s Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses

24. Infoporn: The Cost of Living on the Bleeding Edge of Technology

25. Map of All Yahoo! APIs and Services

26. Digital Media Weights and Measures

27. Global Color Usage with Respect to Time and Location / 2009 / SML + Adobe Kuler Pulse

28. Facebook vs. Twitter

Do you feel infographics are effective to display information? Please share with us any other infographics that can be of interest to web designers.

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: V8zN5Z