One of the projects I’m fortunate to be a part of is 21Foundation, an educational organisation established to help bring about widespread adoption of 21st century teaching / learning techniques.

My role there is to help create an presence for the foundation on the social networks, and as a part of this I’ve spent the last couple of days learning more about how you can customise your Facebook fan page. Having a custom landing page really helps you stand out from the crowd, and allows you to get your message across quickly and clearly, rather than having it lost amongst a bunch of wall posts.

Although I’d never touched FBML before (Facebook’s own flavour of HTML), I was surprised by how close to HTML it was (at least at a basic level) – and it didn’t take long to create a new landing page for 21 Foundation.

Having seen me do this, I was asked to create a simple guide that could be shared with others who also wanted to do the same. Much of the information I took from www.hyperarts.com – they have an excellent series of online tutorials.

Ironically, just hours after I finished putting the guide together Facebook changed how fan pages look if you’re logged in and ‘like’ a page – they added the default sidebar and shrunk the main content section by about 25% (down to 520px). (I’ve since updated the guide to reflect those changes).

There’s a lot more to customising your Facebook presence than what’s in this guide – this is just the first steps you can take, and doesn’t cover app creation etc.

Download the PDF guide here.

I’ll be cross-posting this entry at www.21foundation.com.