Archive for the ‘Web Tips’ Category

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Facebook lately. I don’t know what it is, but Facebook seems to be hitting critical mass, as even my parents are on FB now. Here’s an article we ran on the Guru Blog at Boone Digital on how to set up a Facebook page for your business.

I’ve received two good leads and one client through Facebook, and since it’s free advertising and networking, that’s gravy. My Facebook page can be accessed from the link at the top of this web site.

Social Networking websites like Facebook are increasingly becoming the place to find more clients and business partners. These websites are not just for social networking, but for networking, period. In the first month of 2009 alone, more than 20 million new users opened a Facebook account. Tapping into that market is free and fairly simple. Here?s how to create a Facebook page for your business or organization.

This tutorial assumes you have already created a Facebook account. You need a personal account before you can create a Facebook page for your business.

1. Log into Facebook and scroll to the very bottom of your screen.
2. Click on the Advertising link in the footer links.
3. Click on the ?Pages? link (there?s a flag next to it at the top of the page in the links for the Advertising section)
4. On the Facebook Pages page, click the button ?Create a Page?
5. Select the type of business, enter the name, and proceed through the setup for your new page as prompted.
6. Upload your logo and make sure to add your phone numbers, website address, fax number, email address, etc.
7. To activate your page, you will need to ?Publish? it. There will be a link to prompt you to do this.
8. Now that you?ve created the page for your business, post it to your wall on your personal Facebook page so your friends will know about it. You can even email your friends (Facebook only allows you to message 20 at a time) to encourage them to become fans of your new page.
9. In the future, to manage your Facebook page for your business, a link named ?Ads and Pages? will appear on your Facebook page. To manage, you will click this link to access both areas.
10. That?s it!

So you?ve created a Facebook page for your business, now what? What can it do for you? How do you utilize it to create new business?

• When other Facebook users ?fan? your page, a mini version of your logo will show up on their profiles. You can?t ?friend? people with your page, but people can ?fan? your page.
• From within your Facebook page for your business, you can send ?Updates? to your fans to tell them when you have a new product, specials, events, or anything else. This is probably the best use of the Facebook pages for your business.
• Post ?Links? on your page that go to specific pages on your company website, such as your products or services page. Or post a link to an article you wrote on your website that will garner interest.
• Create and run Facebook ads for your business and send the click-throughs to your Facebook page and ultimately to your company website. There is a cost for this, but it?s fairly affordable compared to other forms of online advertising.

There are many social networking websites, but Facebook is currently the leader in users and buzz. Don?t miss a chance to market to the hundreds of millions of users that lurk on Facebook every day.

Web developers should take careful consideration of the manner in which we present text to the user. It’s important that the text is easy to read. One way this can be accomplished is by setting the Leading and Kerning in the CSS (cascading style sheets) file. Here’s a short tutorial to help you understand what “leading” and “kerning” are and how to manipulate them through CSS. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will assume you have a good understanding of CSS.

Leading
When we talk about “leading” we are discussing the spacing between lines of content. The default is 120% of the type size, that is, the space between each line of text will equal 20% more than the size of the font being used. Let’s see an example:

This is a small font with the line-height set to 120%. I have used CSS to specify the line-height, but even if I hadn’t, the web browser would have used 120%, since that is the default. At this font size, this text is readable, but could prove difficult for those without very good eyesight. In addition, depending on which font color and background color used, it could be troublesome.

Let’s add some extra breathing room:

Here we use the same small font, but the line-height has been bumped to 140%. Obviously, it’s much more readable than the first example.

Now, let’s go a little farther to illustrate the point:

The line-height is set to 160% for this text, which gives the text more room at this small font size and makes it much more readable. In addition, in certain cirumstances, this formatting can draw more attention to the text, since it is spread out. For example, used with a gradient or other DIV background, it would make a nice impact.

This is what you’ll need to add to your CSS to format to paragraphs in this manner shown above:

p {line-height:140%;}

Kerning
Kerning is the space between characters of text. You might want to adjust this for use in headlines or sub-headers, or other special purposes. Let’s tinker with kerning.

The Giants Win the Pennant!

The letter-spacing for the above text is set to 4 pixels, the default is 0. Now, let’s get really crazy and widen the letter-spacing even more.

The Giants Win the Pennant!

Now, our headline demands even more attention because the letter-spacing is set to 9 pixels. Had there been a World Wide Web in 1951, Giants fans would have went crazy over this headline on their favorite blog.

Finally, we’ll tighten the spacing by using negative numbers.

The Giants Win the Pennant!

The text above has a letter-spacing of -2. By the way, for headlines, if you want to control the spacing between the words, use this in your stylesheet:

h1 { word-spacing: 1.1em }

The Giants Win the Pennant!

The word-spacing in the above headline is set to 1.8em

Please note, that line-height (leading) and letter-spacing (kerning) can be specified in your external style sheet, internal style, or inline.