A client asked the following question:

In your opinion, what are the best practices for setting up a business Facebook account?  What is your advice for the best app for creating a Welcome Page? for event listings?

Here’s my answer:

A lot of businesses make the default tab a welcome page with special offers, testimonials, graphics, and so forth. While this is a great way to focus visitors attention on your products or services, more and more businesses are using Facebook to build brand identity – focusing more on interactions with users. For this reason, many pages make the default tab the Wall or Discussion Boards, so that when a user visits the page, they see what others are saying about the business and its products and services – positive reviews, stories about how they use a product, etc. (Smaller businesses can solicit this kind of content with contests: “five randomly selected fans who post their first memory of Product X on our Wall during November will win a $20 Amazon gift card”.) This approach makes the page seem less like just another marketing channel, and more like a community of people who appreciate the business or product.

However, if you determine that having a custom welcome page is best for your business, there are many apps that will do this for you. One that I’ve used in the past is TabPress: it’s free and lets you display custom HTML (including images and links) to visitors. You can display different content to people who already like your page, vs. people who have not yet liked it.

As far as event listings, again there are many Facebook apps that add this functionality. Facebook’s built-in Events app may do the trick, or you can use a more advanced calendar app like Events Calendar.

I received a question from a client today:

Can I have special fonts show up on all browsers?  I know that was not possible some years ago, but I am tired of using Verdana, Arial, and Times Roman.

Here’s my answer:

Certainly, this is now possible. There are a few options for using uncommon fonts on websites:

• TypeKit: a service you subscribe to. TypeKit will host all the Javascript necessary to render your fonts, plus they give you access to a large library of fonts you can use (no need to worry about licensing & legalities). For CSS3-supporting browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and sometimes Opera), the service uses the CSS3 propery font-face. In other non-CSS3 browsers (Internet Explorer), TypeKit uses Javascript to get the font to render correctly.

• Cufón: this works by using Javascript to replace a textual element with a canvas element on which is rendered the appropriate font. The downside of this is that you cannot select the text drawn on the canvas element. Cufón is free and self-hosted. You need to make sure that the license for the font you want to use covers web distribution.

• Google web fonts: Google’s hosted font tool. Like TypeKit, Google fonts uses the CSS3 propery font-face, falling back on Javascript if CSS3 is unsupported.

Using something like TypeKit to render all the text of a website can slow certain browsers/devices down a bit – you have to wait for the libraries to load and the scripts to run. However, for most platforms this is barely noticeable.

Any designer you’re working with should be aware of these tools, and any developer should be able to implement them.

I recently received a question from a client:

Does Google Analytics increase hits to a website? Is it worth using?

Here’s my answer:

Google Analytics doesn’t directly increase traffic to your site, it just gives you reports about traffic you’re already getting – how many hits you get, to which pages, what links are people arriving from, how long do they typically spend on your site, and so on. However, you could use this information to make an educated guess about where to focus your resources to increase hits on your website.

For example, if most of the traffic to your website comes from people who search “German Shepherd puppies”, you might put more effort into SEO, to increase your search engine ranking for those search terms. If, on the other hand, most of your traffic comes from links on other websites (maybe pet enthusiast sites, or dog breeder sites), you may want to focus on pursuing link exchanges with other such sites.

One way to increase traffic and exposure for your website is to purchase advertising (for example with Google AdWords). With most online advertising services, you can set up a monthly budget for ads, and you can target specific key words. The ads then appear on other websites that embed ads with Google AdSense.

Did you know?
Around 40-50% of all websites use Google Analytics.

A neat feature of Google Analytics is that it integrates with other online services. For example, if you use Google AdWords for advertising, Google analytics will tell you information about how many ads it placed on which websites, how many clicks were generated, and once the user arrived at your site, what they looked for, how long they stayed, etc. Or if you use a service like MailChimp for sending email newsletters, you can configure Google Analytics to report information about how many messages were sent/delivered, click-through rates, etc.

You can sign up for Google Analytics for free, so there’s not really anything to lose – I’d recommend that you try it. When you sign up, Google will give you a Tracking Code that needs to be embedded on your website in order for Google to be able to track hits. It’s just a simple Javascript which is easy to add to the template of most sites. You can always remove the script if you decide that Google Analytics is not the right tracking product for your business.