I’m often asked how to set up your own Facebook welcome tab.  If you don’t have the budget to hire a designer or someone like me to create your landing page is it possible to do it yourself?  The answer is of course yes.

I’ve spoken about landing pages a lot. I think they give us a wonderful opportunity to tell people who visit our page a bit more about what we do and encourage them to click that ‘Like’ button.

Creating your own customised page from scratch can be complicated and requires some tech knowledge and skills. The good news is that there are lots of free applications out there that can assist you.  Here’s my top three:

1. Pagemodo

For me these are the original user friendly landing tabs. They’ve recently launched new designs that are even prettier. It’s easy to slot in images and texts to make them your own.  You can choose from a variety of free templates and there are some more feature rich options in their premium packages.

The one disadvantage is that you have to edit the page on their website and then send it to Facebook. If you want to change your page you can only do this through the website.

2. WooBox

I really like the whole suite of applications that WooBox offers. Their custom page creation tool is great, you can input text and images through a very simple interface, no HTML knowledge is required but if you prefer to enter your own markup you can switch to the HTML editor.  You don’t need to go off Facebook to edit either, when you access your page you can click into the editor directly from here.

You can even create Fangates (content only people who like the page can see).  The biggest advantage of Woobox is that it comes with free stats showing you pageviews and conversions to likes.

3. Static HTML

If you know your HTML Static HTML is a great app. You can simply cut and paste your markup into a box and you have your page.  For people like me who often make HTML errors it handily marks errors in red making them easy to spot and correct.  You can easily create fangates and as with Woobox you edit directly from your Facebook page.  This gives you complete control over the content you upload.   However you will need to host your images elsewhere as this isn’t supported in application.

If you’d like a professionally designed Welcome or custom Facebook page we’re still running a contest on Twitter. We’ve one more prize of a free customised page to give away. Enter the competition here. We’ll draw the winner when we reach 700 Likes.

The Static FBML application that helped you create custom Facebook landing pages is being phased out. It was due to disappear on Friday but Facebook have extended the deadline to the 18th of March 2011. After this date you will be unable to create new FBML applications although you will continue to be able to edit existing applications.

What is a Landing page?

We’ve talked about Landing pages a lot before. These pages are seen by those who don’t already ‘Like’ your page the first time they visit. Most users will only see this page once so the key call to action of that page should be to get them to click the ‘Like’ button. Here’s a video we made recently about some pages we really like.  And here are some pages we have designed for clients.

What is replacing Static FBML?

As a replacement Facebook now allow you to create iframe applications for your business page. This is slightly more complicated than FBML and requires you to host the page on your own hosting space and create an application within Facebook. The advantage is that you can do far more with the pages, for example javascript that allows you to do things like rollovers wasn’t allowed within FBML but is possible within iframes.

Can you create iframes if you don’t have hosting space?

There are a growing number of Facebook applications that allow you to create your own custom Facebook page.  Pagemodo is a favorite of mine as it’s easy to use and you can include click thrus.  Here’s our guide on how to use it.  I just discovered this page from NCI that looks great and was created using Pagemodo.

PageLever is a very simple application.  The free version allows you to add an image to your custom tab but to do anything more complex you will need to subscribe to the service.

Finally Static FBML: iframes tabs was pointed out to me yesterday.  It looks great and I love the way it allows you to keep some of the FBML functionality.  Has anyone tried it?  I’d love to hear what you think so if you have used it leave a comment below.

Competition

Don’t forget if you would like a Welcome Tab designed professionally for you we have a competition at the moment on our Facebook page.  Every 100 ‘Likes’ we get up to 700 will win a page.  Click here to enter.

If you’re are a Twitter user you could be in with the chance of winning a €50 voucher for Spiderworking.com.

If your not on Twitter yet what better reason to join!

All you have to do to enter is Tweet @spiderworking with a question about twitter  including  #smq in your tweet.

We will of course answer your question and will collate all our responses in a blog post including links to your Twitter account and Website.

So get tweeting today for a chance to win!