Puzbie: websites the way you want them.
Facebook and Twitter
It seems the world and his wife is on facebook these days. Most TV adverts for products ask you to follow them on Facebook. Quite why anybody would want to follow Andrex is beyond me, but follow them you can, or their puppies at least. If you want your company to have a Facebook presence but don't know where to start then there are a number of options available to you. The most common approach is to have a Facebook Fan Page which allows people to post comments, and provides them with useful content. It can refer to your main website, and you can add LIKE buttons to your main site that promote your Facebook Fanpage. You could even dispense with a traditional website and just have a Facebook presence. However we wouldn't recommend that, as Facebook may one day go the way of Myspace, and be replaced by THE NEXT BIG THING.
This is the welcome page we did for the Glamourous Gowns Fan Page. It displays dynamic content, by cycling through a range of products available on Glamourous Gowns. If you click one of the thumbnails, it takes you to the main site.
The Welcome page above is whats known as a tabbed app. Tabbed apps are tightly integrated with Facebook, and are perfect landing pages. However, they are, by design, fairly narrow, and can only be 520 pixels wide. If you want more space for your application, you need whats called a Canvas Application.
Canvas Applications take up more of the Facebook page. This gives you more freedom to express your design. However, you lose the Fan Page branding which is displayed on the left of the screen for tabbed applications. We prefer to use tabbed applications for landing pages, with canvas applications reserved for specific functions.
You can also integrate Facebook into your own site. This can be as simple as provide LIKE buttons on your site, to more complicated interactions such as logging in to your site using a Facebook id.
We have also written interfaces allowing your website to interact with Twitter. It is possible to do the same with the likes of LinkedIn. However, until somebody asks us to, we will not be writing any LinkedIn interfaces.
Social Networking is an incredibly powerful tool, that is constantly evolving. In an effort to keep up with the current trends, we created the site Facebook Answers. This is a Wordpress blog that documents some of our experiences with Facebook development. It is helpful to us, as it forms a body of documentation. It is helpful to other people, because they tell us so.
