How to Create Custom Facebook Pages

This tutorial describes how you can create custom apps for your Facebook Fan pages in minutes. 

Your Pages can have maps, tweets, slideshows, music and more inside Tabs.

Facebook has made some significant changes to the layout of Facebook Pages in recent months. The custom landing tabs are gone and all Facebook Pages are now rendered using the new Timeline view. Page owners can add cover photos and they can also highlight important stories by pinning them to the top.

Facebook Pages, by default, include apps for Events, Photos, Videos and Notes. However, if you would like to include custom information on your Facebook Page – maybe a Google Map of your business or YouTube videos or maybe a calendar of events – you need to create an app for that. Let me share a few good examples.

The official Facebook Page for Nokia has a Welcome Tab that highlights some of their recent phones. The Nike page has a Locations Tab that highlights the location of Nokia stores in the country. Apple’s App Store page has a Featured Tab where they have put a list of their top-selling apps and games. The Al Jazeera Page on Facebook has a “Watch Live” Tab where you can watch news right inside Facebook.

Have you ever wondered how do big brands create such interesting Facebook pages? They may have big marketing budgets but do you really need to hire skilled designers or programmers to build such fan pages? Well the answer is obviously no. You can create beautiful custom apps for your Facebook Page without writing a single line of code and all you need are few minutes.

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Building Custom Tabs (Apps) for Facebook Pages

Facebook Apps for Pages, in simple English, are like regular web pages that are embedded inside Facebook using the IFRAME tag. Thus, any object that can be embedded in a HTML web page – like audio MP3s, Google Maps, YouTube videos, presentations, Google Calender, jQuery Carousels, photo slideshows, etc. – can be easily added to your Facebook Pages.

Before we get into the actual process of creating custom tabs (or apps) for Facebook Pages, we need a find a place to host the HTML, CSS, Images, JavaScript and other files associated with our web pages. I prefer using Google Sites to host pages because they are free, you get a WYSIWYG editor to create pages and Google Sites can be integrated with Google Analytics so you more easily track visits to your Facebook pages.

The other big reason is that Google Sites can serve pages over secure (https) and regular (http) connections. This is an extremely important point because a majority of Facebook users may have turned on “secure browsing” in their security settings. If your Facebook app serves content from a regular (http) URL, all these users will see is a warning message and you definitely don’t want this to happen. Google Sites is thus a recommended option.

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