A Beginner’s Guide to Customized Facebook Pages

With Facebook pages being one of the main ways to effectively promote your blog, business, band or organization online, this beginner’s guide to customized Facebook pages will help you to get to grips with creating a simple, personalized Facebook page. This will give you more flexibility to direct visitors to your best, most relevant content, instead of just showing your most recent wall posts.

1. The first thing to note is that Facebook has moved away from hosting the customized pages themselves as FBML (Facebook mark-up language), instead favoring iFrames to display content that you create and host yourself as HTML or PHP pages. For anyone not confident enough to write their own code, you can download the template file and folder below, and upload it to your server. The elements can be changed to contain your own background picture, banner image, logo and text. You can also tweak the locations of all of these by simply changing the numbers that relate to each items position in relation to the top and left of the page.

If you’re a bit more proficient at HTML, or you have iWeb on your Mac, you can develop a much more stylized customized Facebook page, like the Tuppence Magazine entertainment news facebook app page.

The only thing to remember is that you only have 520px by 700px to work with.

2. There is also coding added to the document to ensure that there are no scroll bars in the page. The only thing you need to do is to add the app reference number to the document. Further instructions for this have been added directed to the download HTML document to make it easier to edit.

3. Now that you have your page edited and uploaded onto your server with the folders for all of the files, you’re ready to set it as an iFrame on your Facebook page. The first step for this is to use the Facebook search box to find the Facebook Developers area. From here you can simply click on the box entitles “+ Set Up New App” to start the process.

4. In the next page you just need to give your customized page the name you want it to be called, agree to the terms and conditions and click on the “Create App” button.

5. Once you’ve added the captcha to confirm your humanity, you get to work your way through the tabs in the left hand side. In the first, the “About” section, you need to reenter your app name, give it a little description, upload a little icon if you have one and a logo that goes well with the overall aims of the “app”.

6. Next you move onto the “Facebook Integration” section. Here you need to start by adding the canvas URL, which is the directory on your server where the file has been added. You do not need to add the file name and extension to the canvas URL (e.g. if your file can be found at www.mysite.com/facebook/my-facebook-app.html, you enter www.mysite.com/facebook/)

7. Set the canvas type to iFrame and set the canvas size to auto resize. For the third and final time you need to add the name of the tab in the ”Tab Name” field.

8. The place to add the file name and extension – e.g. my-facebook-app.html – is in the “Tab URL” field, and then you just click on “Save changes”.

9. In the following page, click on the “Application Profile Page” link, just below “Edit Settings”. On the next page you need to click on the “Add To My Page” link in the left hand navigation and select the page you want to add the tab to.

10. Now the tab will be visible on your Facebook page below your wall tab – look for the icon you gave it. You can even set it to be your main landing tab in the “Manage permissions” section of the “Edit page” area.

And that’s it, you have your very own customized Facebook tab, but the best thing is that you can have more than one for different campaigns or events, so there is a lot of scope for development. If you have any trouble with this beginner’s guide to Facebook pages, please leave comments below.