Customizing Facebook Pages with a Boxes Tab

Prerequisites:

1. Facebook Account
2. Basic HTML knowledge

You can create a blog or a personal web page online, but Facebook Pages is a great and free way to advertise your work. All you need is to open an account if you don’t have one yet and create a Page. From there you get to choose some options to configure your page and target your audience.

While the Facebook Pages are great and simple to use, they are very limited when it comes to customizations. Fortunately, there are a couple of tricks that will allow you to personalize your page and make it stand out, even drive more people to your official site.

This tutorial will show you how to add the Boxes tab to your page and set it as the home page. The Boxes tab will allow the use of HTML code so that you can add links and images from external sources.

When you first create your page you end up with a fairly basic and boring interface. The main page is the Wall tab where you get to see what you and your fans are posting and you have a sidebar with some basic information, photo albums, number of followers, and so on. It is highly recommended to add an attractive logo to your page and to write up a brief description of what users should expect to find on this page (i.e. a sample of your work in progress?).

To get started, you’ll need to click on the Edit Page link. This will bring you to the following page with some more options, as well as a link to add More Applications. You need to click on Browse More.

Look for the Facebook Static FBML application. You can simply search for it using the search bar and click on the link to browse to the application’s page.

Once there, click on the Add to My Page link. This will bring up a list of all of your pages and you’ll be able to select which page to add it to.

You will be taken back to your page where you’ll now notice a new tab called Boxes.

Click on Edit Page again and locate the new application called FBML – FBML.

Click on the Edit link to modify it. You can now enter a Box Title and also enter code in the FBML box. Here’s an example of what you can enter, but you can also simply type text:

——————————–
Box Title: Sunrise Artists – Official Web Site
<a href=”http://sunriseartists.com”><img src=”http://yourdomain.com/misc/facebook_boxes_pic.jpg” alt=”yourdomain.com” width=”380″ height=”309″ />
——————————–

This example will create a box with an image that will be a direct link to our official website.
Note: you obviously have to point the source URL to an existing image.

Once you have the desired information, you can save your changes and go back to the Wall tab for one final configuration change.
From the Wall tab, click on Settings and select “Boxes” from the “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else”. This will ensure that all new users will be taken to the Boxes tab first.

You can add as many FBML boxes as you wish. Here’s an example of the type of customization you can achieve following this tutorial.