8 25
Facebook changes … again!
Effective August 23rd, well yesterday, there are some major changes to Facebook Fan Pages. Here’s a quick run down:
- The maximum width requirement for fan pages is now 520px.
- The boxes tag will be removed
How does this effect you, the Facebook user? If you have a page for your business, you will have to make changes to it. During the week of August 23rd, Facebook will automatically be implementing this change. That means that if you have a graphic page layout that is WIDER than the new width of 520 PX it will be truncated or rendered in such a way that it is basically useless.
Take this for example:
I think it's obvious that the owner of this fan page does NOT want it to look like this...
So, let everyone know – Facebook Fan Pages must now be 520PX wide and no wider – at least until Facebook decides to change again…
3 23
Tracey Lawton – new header for Thesis theme
I was contacted by Tracey Lawton to design an attractive header to work with her blog theme – Thesis. As many of you may know, Thesis is a highly versatile theme that is used by many bloggers on the Wordpress platform. The challenge is not to create a header, but to create one that artfully shows what the client does without taking over the entire design.
Tracey wanted a design that was attractive yet fun; she wanted to use her headshot and she had specific colors she wanted to use. To quote the client, “The look that I’m going for is professional and crisp, yet fun and informal.”
The first 2 looks were close, but not quite there:
They were close but not there YET! Finally, I took elements from both the first and second version and came up with this:
That was it! Tracey was pleased and we put it up on her blog – you can take a look here:
If you’d like to read what Tracey had to say, here’s her testimonial:
I asked Debbi to create a header for me for my blog and she did a fabulous job; I’m so pleased with it. I told her some basics of what I was after, particularly in terms of colors, but wasn’t too sure about the style. She took what I told her and came up with three great designs for me to choose from – one of which was perfect. She turned all this around in less than a week and even uploaded my new header onto my blog for me.
I’ll definitely use Debbi again and now have a great referral source for my clients. Thank you Debbi!
Tracey Lawton
Online Business Development Strategist
www.traceylawton.com
3 13
Previewing a site with Godaddy hosting
First off, Godaddy is NOT my favorite company for domains/hosting/etc. The interface makes things more complicated than necessary, installing programs can be difficult and sometimes direct FTP access via Dreamweaver or Filezilla won’t work.
That said, their customer support is always very helpful!
So, I had a website that needed to be built with Godaddy hosting while leaving the existing site (pointed at a different DNS) live. I wanted to be able to preview the domain as I built it on the server without switching the DNS.
Usually, this is easily done if you’re using hosting such as Bluehost. Godaddy – not so easy. After looking around online for a bit, I decided to call Godaddy and see if they could help. This is what I found:
Login to your Godaddy account and click on HOSTING on the left sidebar menu:
Next, you’ll see the hosting manager. Click on ‘manage account’:
This will open a new window with your hosting account summary. Towards the bottom, you’ll see Primary Domain DNS:
When you click ‘view’, a small box will appear. It will show your CURRENT nameservers, as well as the Preview DNS feature. If it is already activated, as it is in the case below, you can click on the link to see a preview of your site as you are building it. If it is NOT enabled, you can simply click ENABLE, which will allow this to happen. It does take a bit of time to be processed – not more than 24 hours.
When you click Preview My Site, you will see this:
Click on the link and a new window will open with the preview site. NOTE: if you’re building with Wordpress, as I was, you can still login to the backend by using the preview DNS URL and adding /wp-login.php at the end. Works great!