New to Story Maps - the basics - templates?

Question

Hello everyone

I hope all are well and safe!  My organisation has used ArcGIS for some time, and now has a couple of specific large projects for which it wants to create Stories on Story Maps.

I've done a bit of looking into it and it seems reasonable intuitive so hopefully I can get to grips with it.

I wondered about two things:

1. What are the best resources for learning about creating stories? (particularly those where interactive maps are included) - if there are any videos our there that would be great as I find these easiest to digest.

2. There only seems to be two template/layout options which as the standard cascade, and then Sidecar which is the same but you can split the screen to include more images/maps.  Is there any more templates available?  Either through esri or third party?

Thank you in advance!

Si

SimonLaughton · Answer

Thank you Owen! I'll spend this morning looking at the resources you've provided 🙂  Star, thanks.

oevans_storymaps · Answer

Welcome @SimonTDC!

Here are some great resources to get started...

* Our main resources page has lots of articles and content about planning and building stories
* Here's a gallery of amazing stories created by our team and the storytelling community that you can use to get inspiration
* The ArcGIS StoryMaps blog has many more articles about specific features and skill you can learn as well as monthly posts about what new features have been added
* Here's a collection of tutorials that will help you learn about specific storytelling topics
* You can also follow us on Twitter to get lots of timely updates and tips about new features and new stories

If others have favorite resources, it would be great if they could post them here too. Some in particular I would check out are these:

* Choreograph your maps with ArcGIS StoryMaps
* Supercharge your stories with map actions
* Six(ish) ways to use sidecar in ArcGIS StoryMaps

To address your second question, ArcGIS Storymaps has many different types of content blocks you can add to a story: sidecar, slideshow, map tour, swipe, image gallery, map actions, and more. Check out the tutorials and other resources above to learn more about what these are and how to use them.

Hopefully these will keep you busy for a while! 🙂