Creating a Custom Facebook Page

Have you ever wondered how to create a Facebook page for your business that contains unique content, and the content is different for someone who “likes” your page versus someone who hasn’t? this post describes the technical details for how to do this. If you need help, don’t worry – you can always contact me at WebStores Ltd! There are 12 basic steps to doing this, and 4 files that you will need to download here.

Step 1: Create a business page. Go to http://www.Facebook.com/WebStoresLtd and in the lower left portion of the screen click on “create a page”

Step 2: Choose the type of page to create. In this case, we’ll choose “Local Business or Place”

Step 3: Fill in basic information and agree to terms of service

Step 4: Add your profile image. OK, now you have a basic page, you need to add a profile image. the image size should be 180 pixels wide and approximate 350 to 450 pixels tall.

Step 5: Create an “app”. To create a new application, go to:
https://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php

Give your application a name and agree to the terms of service.

Step 6: Set up the facebook integration.

Step 7: Fill in information for the Canvas and the Tab Settings as shown.

Things you need to know:

The “canvas” page can be any unique name, but must NOT contain spaces or special characters.
The “canvas” URL is a webpage that exists on another server – typically where your website is hosted. This MUST be a dynamic page, such as facebook_tab.php and must include a url variable, such as ?id=fb. In this example, I have entered: http://208.106.231.71/MyWebsite/facebook_tab.php?id=fb
You must also specify a secure canvas page. If you do not do this, those visiting your page with a secure connection (the current Facebook default), will be unable to see your page. If the server hosting your website does not have a secure connection, you cannot do this.
Under Page Tabs, give the tab a name, such as “Welcome”.
Copy the canvas page ans secure canvas page to the Tab URL and Secure Tab URL.

Step 8: Click on Application Profile Page

Step 9: Add to Page. Now that your application is built, it must be added to the page you created in steps 1-3 above.

Step 10: Pick which page to add it to:

Step 11: Go to the page, and “Edit” the page. You are now going to make the new tab be the default landing page whenever a new visitor reaches your page (Visitors who have previously “Liked” your page will always be taken to the “Wall”).

Click on “Manage Permissions”, then change the “Default Landing Tab” to the tab name you created in step 7.

Step 12: Create the Pages and upload them (ftp) to your website server. In step 7, you specified “facebook_tab.php as the filename to reference when someone lands on your page. this file actually references two other files that you must also have on your server: “Like.htm” and No-Like.htm”. Additionally, the file “facebook_tab.php” must be editted to contain your unique appID and applicationSecret from facebook as shown in the image below.

There are a total of 4 files needed to make all this work:

facebook_tab.php
facebook.php
fb_like.htm
fb_nolike.htm

As I indicated, you need to modify facebook_tab.php to include your unique appID and applicationSecret. There is no need to modify the facebook.php file – this contains the code to determine if someone has liked your page or not.

The fb_like.htm and fb_nolike.htm SHOULD be modified with your own content – this is what gets displayed to your visitors. As a general guideline, these pages should fit within a 500 pixels wide by 800 pixel high area. In order to insure that your content displays within this fixed area, it is a good idea to force your page to this size (via table widths or CSS).