The new Facebook timeline for brands is big news for any business or organisation that manages a Facebook page.
In summary, the new format has a cover photo at the top of the page, and the page is separated into two main columns by a dividing line which represents the passage of time. This format provides brands with the opportunity to incorporate their corporate history with milestones, such as product launches, store openings, etc. The left-side panel of tabs has gone and with it, the option to set a default landing page, however this has made way for a wider page. There is a new way to feature content with the ability to “pin” certain posts to the top of the Timeline, in a similar way to marking a blog post “sticky,” so that it remains at the top of a blog for a specified period.
Read what this means for you Facebook Timeline
See the new 350pages Facebook Timeline
Design Corner – E-commerce
E-Commerce is a growing business opportunity. Forrester Research predict that e-commerce sales in the U.S. will keep growing at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate up to $250billion by 2014. It forecasts in Western Europe, a slightly faster 11 percent growth rate for online retail sales, going to 114.5 billion Euros in 2014. Forrester’s estimates exclude online sales of autos, travel, and prescription drugs.
The benefits of selling your products online are numerous, especially if you're a small business. In past years, you may have only been able to retail your products locally, but with the exploitation of the internet as a communication platform anyone in the world can potentially browse and purchase your wares.
At 350pages, we provide the tools for you to build effective and attractive websites that can be tailored to reach whatever target audience you desire, but we know that regardless of the quality of service we provide, you need to be sure of your design and content to deliver a truly effective website. Whilst we can't write the content for you, we can certainly give you advice on the design and structure of your website, and that's what we'll be doing over the next few months on the blog with a series of Design Corner articles, covering different genres of website and how best to fit our templates and tools with your vision.
See the key points for designing a, e-commerce website
Unleash your Creativity - Using Galleries for E-commerce
If you are wishing to run an e-store featuring a large inventory, you'll want an easy way to display all of your products on a single or multiple pages. The gallery is the best way of achieving this.
Each image in the gallery is placed into its own frame which can be customised along with its caption and you can then add, for example, titles and descriptions and payment buttons.
The images will be displayed as thumbnails that open up a much larger image when your website visitor clicks on it. Your visitors can then select a forward or back button to browse through all the images on your webpage as a slideshow.
Take this example of a gallery style template that already had a default canvas background and width set up within the gallery settings (this can, of course, be changed).
The description was entered as a caption within the framed image editor and that will also appear in the slideshow.
To provide a heading, a new graphic or paragraph object can be added ‘before’ the framed image. ‘After’ the framed image you can add your PayPal Add To Cart button.
Set up all of your products and don’t forget to include your PayPal View-cart button on the web page so your visitors can buy their chosen products.
You can add, delete, sort or move products in your gallery as you wish. It takes only a short time to create your e-store.
See the tutorial for creating your e-commerce website
SEO Myths
Continuing our series of dispelling the myths surrounding Search Engine Optimisation here are a few more:
Myth 3: You need to update your website frequently. Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl rate, but it won’t increase your rankings. If your website doesn’t need to change, don’t change it just because you think the search engines will like it better. They won’t. In fact, some of the highest ranking websites in Google haven’t been touched in years.
Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings. This one is funny to me because about half the people who think that running Google AdWords will affect their organic rankings believe that they will bring them down; the other half believe they will bring them up. That alone should tell you that neither is true!
See March newsletter for Myths 1 and 2
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Customize your Facebook Pages
In line with the Facebook Timeline changes we have widened the Slim templates. Whether it’s your fan pages for business or club or your personal pages customize your Facebook using the new 350pages slim template styles.
See example Facebook
Upgrade your 350pages to use the Slim templates.
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