Think Again About Facebook Landing Pages

I know some HTML. Just enough to get frustrated. I also know some PHP--same deal. Our old website used to be done in both and I had to learn enough, or at least learn to copy the right strings, to keep it up. That seems like ages ago.

When it came time to launch a new Facebook page, I really wanted to try my hand at a Facebook landing page. I liked the concept of being able to have something more graphically exciting than the FB wall. When I first Googled "Facebook landing pages", I found 45,500,000 entries. Yikes. There are videos and articles aimed at beginners and experts alike.  Here is a look at five good examples from Mashable.

I looked at some examples from college athletics and the best one I could find at the time was the Wisconsin Badger page. They change this frequently, and right now their tickets tab is the main visual page.

I got inspired, so I decided to tackle the project, kinda. There's that FBML. I had asked around and found out that FBML was pretty similar to HTML but without a lot of the tags and stuff. It's that "tags and stuff" info that bothered me. So, I looked online for information and soon found there was too much info. Then I got saddled with the track guide. And then the annual report. So, I decided to farm it out, literally.

We hired a local web development company here in Bozeman named Future Farm to code the page for us. I just didn't have time to mess with it. I made them all the graphics, designed the page and just asked them to put it together. They didn't charge us much and I really like the way it turned out. This year we are using the "I'm a Bobcat" theme on everything, so I used the FBML application on Facebook to construct and name the tab. That was not very hard.

We are hosting the graphics in a folder on our FTP site with Sidearm. Whenever I want to change a graphic, I just make another one the size to fit one of the holes, upload the graphic to the FTP, find the line of code in the FBML page and re-path the new graphic in the FBML code. Now that I have bought the code, I can re-use it for other tab pages as well. By the way, we branded all the graphics to our web page. It's a little wordy, so I am working on editing the cutlines.

What do you think? Have you got a landing page on your Facebook page? Could you leave the URL in the comments? It would be cool to see what others are doing.