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We worked with the talented team at Square Tomato in Seattle to develop this snazzy holiday campaign site for The Shops at The Bravern in Bellevue, WA.  We developed some really fun jQuery effects around their design to spice things up and add some interactivity.  It’s amazing what you can do now without Flash!  Building this site resulted in my article about Facebook Open Graph which you can see was used quite effectively on this site.  Take a look for yourself here.

We recently had quite the experience battle with Facebook Open Graph Protocol.  From here on out we will refer to it as OGP.

Okay so what is it?

Well, to make a long answer as short as possible, OGP is a series of tags you can use in the metadata of your web pages to help push info to Facebook and make sharing more seamless between your website and Facebook.

How will I use it?

Most people use OGP tags on their website and blog posts to tell Facebook what descriptions, titles, and images to use when a user shares your content on Facebook.  There are many other advanced ways of pushing other OGP tags to Facebook.  You can learn here about more advanced uses: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

How do I implement Open Graph Tags?

If you are working in a CMS like WordPress, don’t bother entering your tags manually.  There are plenty of plugins to help you out with this.  If you need to enter the tags manually it’s pretty easy.  Go here and paste in the tags above the </head> tag in the HTML of your page.  Then just make sure to edit the metadata appropriately for your URL and info.

How do I check my work?

To make sure Facebook is reading your OGP tags go to the Facebook URL Linter and enter the URL of the page you entered the tags on.  The URL linter will catch any errors in your metadata and display the data you are pushing to Facebook.  Edit the OGP tags so that no erorrs are returned on the URL linter.

What else should I know?

• You need a unique URL to share an item on Facebook.  If you have a slideshow that does not display unique URL’s for each item, you cannot share slides from your slideshow.
• Keep in mind when you are testing your work that the title becomes fixed after you share something 50 times. So, if you are testing a URL too much and are not seeing any changes, that’s why.
• Also, sometimes the URL linter has to refresh its’ cache so don’t be impatient.  If you change something, and it’s not displaying in the URL linter, check your work.  If you are sure you did everything right, wait.  Log in tomorrow and enter the URL again.  Everything should be fine.

I would love to hear about your experience with Facebook Open Graph Tags.  Do you have any tips of your own to add?

We just finished the final touches on developing a site for CASE, a Political Action Committee.  We took the designs and implemented them into our Genus Online Business Solution.  This enables the board at CASE to update the site with new information as well as control their e-commerce donation system.  We will be adding new features in the coming months and are very excited about the potential of this project.

We just helped Sophos law in Seattle update and customize a new WordPress theme for their blog The Neighborhood Entrepreneur .  If you are a startup, entrepreneur or are looking for insight into the world of business law I would bookmark this valuable source for information.

We have launched the website for Seattle child clothing designer Ricicli. Ricicli asked us to design a simple yet functional website that serves as an eCommerce store as well as a hub for wholesalers.  We utilized the Genus Online Business Solution to implement retail and wholesale pricing simultaneously along with keeping track of stock and customer sales using Genus’s powerful analytics system.

We were commissioned by Artjocks in LA to implement a WordPress blog with all the bells and whistles.  Bardo is a a great band and the blog enables them to engage their fan base directly.

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