New PortlandMaps.com Released

The City of Portland has a new way for community members to search for addresses, parks, and other mapping information. A beta site, providing access to the newly upgraded version of the City’s portlandmaps.com website, is now available for public use. You can find it at www.portlandmaps.com/beta, through a link on the current www.portlandmaps.com main page, and from pages for individual properties within the site.

This upgrade is “mobile friendly” so it can be used on smartphone and tablets as well as desktop computers and notebooks. The old version of portlandmaps.com gets thousands of hits a day, but doesn’t scale well to small screens or take advantage of the GPS services we all have in our phones and tablets. The new version allows users to zoom automatically based on their location, use a smartphone to browse through complex datasets like permit history, and easily share content they find through text messages or on social media.

The new site allows users to save anything they find on the site for future use, move quickly around the maps on touchscreens, and perform advanced searches of property data with improved visualizations. It also adds predictive address searching, letting users search for features such as parks by name.

“We want to make portlandmaps.com a resource that community members and visitors can use as easily in a park or while walking around their neighborhood as they can at home,” said Matthew Freid, Corporate GIS Program Manager with the City’s Bureau of Technology Services.

The beta site is available so that users can evaluate the new design and send feedback to the development team. The original site will remain available while content and functionality is fully implemented in the new web application.

Users can read more about the new functionality and how to use the site in the “About” section found on the top menu as well as by going to https://www.portlandmaps.com/beta/#about. Users can submit feedback and comments by email to beta.portlandmaps@portlandoregon.gov or by using the “Report” tool within the application. Users can expect to see more data and improved functionality over the next few months as the site is refined before it is moved into full production.

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