This was inevitable, I guess.
Timelines are taking over our personal pages, and someone at Facebook decided we absolutely must have them on business pages as well.
In fact, it’s only three days away, so if you haven’t done so yet, now would be a good time to hop over to your Facebook pages and make the switch over to the new layout. If you don’t then Facebook will do it for you on March 30th.
Key Features of the New Facebook Pages
As far as the front end of your page is concerned, this is a visually dramatic change. You will no longer be able to set up any welcome pages encouraging visitors to like your page, using promises of exclusive content revealed only to those who clicked the Like button.
Instead, you now have a new large prime real estate, in terms of visuals: the header. A huge space, in Internet terms, of 850 by 315 pixels is up at the top of your business page, for you to cleverly put to use towards branding your page.
The body of the page also complies with the timeline layout, which means your updates now show up in two columns. While you do have some control over this, with the option to pin posts or highlight them by making them stretch across two columns at once, this is a tricky set up. Stretch an update to cover both columns and you risk an overall sense of imbalance on your page.
As with personal profiles, the timeline allows you to set dates to your updates, essentially allowing you to work back a history of your company or product with “historic” updates. Dates go back to 1905, by the way.
These are the main changes, as far as I can tell. If you noticed any other significant differences, please do share them in the comments section.
I am moving servers soon, and decided to use that as a trigger for some house cleaning. That of course begs a yard sale, so come in and take a look, maybe you’ll find something that’s a good fit for your next project?
One annoying task I’m facing is combating referrer spam on a blog I currently manage. A combination of high-intensity graphics and a bunch of pesky referrer spam bots who constantly crawl the site are causing an influx of bandwidth usage I would really like to curb. I figured I may ask well make this into a post – hopefully this will be helpful for other bloggers.
