Congratulations to The Inns of Distinction for winning the Website of Excellence Award at the Kensington and Area Chamber of Commerce 2011 Business Awards Gala!
I’d like to also congratulate my new partners – Graphically Speaking, Analytic-OR, and Black Point Marketing & Communications! We all had a hand in making the Inns of Distinction web site a “site of distinction”!
Not really Facebook Customization, but it is useful Facebook information.
I got a phone call from a friend a couple weeks ago saying she had heard about the recent addition of secure browsing to Facebook pages. She had changed her Facebook account to enable it but then discovered that the URL for her page had changed from HTTP:// to HTTPS://. She already had business cards and other marketing material with a Bit.Ly link to her page and a custom URL (Facebook.Her-Domain) printed on them. She wondered if she could change them to use the new URL.
I happen to host her site and created the custom Facebook domain so I was able to change that, but Bit.Ly links cannot be edited so she was out of luck. Because of that she decide to change her Facebook setting to turn off secure browsing.
Yesterday I discovered a couple other reasons why you might not want to use secure browsing in Facebook. This Mashable article – http://mashable.com/2011/01/27/facebook-https/ – is about Facebook’s implementation of secure browsing. The last paragraph talks about how many Facebook applications will not work with secure browsing enabled. Also, if you enable secure browsing it will slow down your pages since encrypted pages take longer to load.
Facebook’s default login process is secured by encryption to reduce the risk of someone gaining access to an account – you don’t need secure browsing for that. Secure browsing is intended for people who use Facebook from public networks like libraries or cafes.
Over the next few weeks I will be writing about my experiences customizing Facebook Business Pages. Although Facebook limits what you can do with your page there are still a few things you can do to make it stand out from the crowd. I hope these posts will help you find out what you can do and how you can do it.
My first attempt at connecting my web site to Facebook was a failure. I was using a plugin for WordPress that asked me to create a Facebook application to connect with. I did that and it created a page that “looked” like a regular business page. I eventually found out that although it acted like a business page it was not. I could not find the page anywhere in Facebook. The only way I could get to the page was through the configuration settings for the plugin – which produced a horrendous URL. If I couldn’t find it how would my clients?
After creating a Facebook Business Page for The Wing and successfully using the very same plugin to connect to it from their web site (but in a different way) I knew I had to change something with my own Facebook “page”. I dumped my old “App” page and created a proper business page. After reconfiguring my plugin my web site was reconnected and things were working much better. You can now find “Your Digital Coach” when you search in Facebook and I have a proper Facebook URL to use as a link.
ps – I found a tip to create a custom Facebook URL – http://facebook.yourdigitalcoach.ca
So, now that I have all that mess straightened out I can get on with trying out some other customizing options. Stay tuned for more of my mistakes!
Scott
Well, I am officially a Director of the Greater Summerside Chamber of Commerce. I think it will be a fun and challenging opportunity. I just hope it doesn’t get to be too much work.
I’ve launched another new web site – just in time for 2011. The Wing is a popular entertainment destination in Summerside. Their old web site was not meeting their needs so they asked if I could help.
Their new web site is more organized, easier for them to maintain themselves, and does a great job of promoting activities at The Wing. We’ve even connected it with a FaceBook business page to expose it to a potentially larger audience.
If you live in or near Summerside you should check out The Wing. It’s a great place to unwind and to enjoy great music!