Announcing the Winners of the Static FBML Contest

Over on Tamar Weinberg’s blog, Techipedia, I wrote an article about how to customize your FBML Page utilizing the Static FBML app on Facebook, along with a few other techniques.  As part of the post we announced a contest.  The 2 best Facebook Pages left in the comments to integrate FBML into a tab using the Static FBML app would win.  I’m proud to announce the winners.  The winners are:

• HyperArts Web Design – these guys did some interesting stuff with Javascript to enable loading of the different tabs without an entire refresh of the page.  One of the tabs even had a web form on it enabling you to contact them.  The overall experience, use of multiple types of HTML elements, and more, provided a full package that I thought deserved to be one of the winners.
• Express – this is a very simple one, but very elegantly designed, and they have a very friendly welcome page on their “What’s New” tab.  I like their use of HTML, and well-designed layout.  I also really like that they used bit.ly links to enable tracking of clicks on the Page.  They link to their other outlets such as Twitter and Youtube as well.

I was very impressed with all the designs and the effort put into them.  Consistently, there are a few things that everyone, including the winners, could have done better though:  I would have loved to see you utilize FBML a bit more.  Perhaps you could utilize the tag to implement tabs to look like Facebook’s.  Or I would have loved to see and video – I don’t think any of the entrants had that.  Maybe you could use to produce a form in a pretty, Facebook-like format.  Perhaps a nicely formatted image of the owners using and could personalize it a bit.  Be sure to get to know as well so you can add comments to your tabs if you want to facilitate discussion.

Overall I’m happy to see what came out of the contest.  My hope is that you can continue this and push your Pages even further.  Get to know what you can do with FBML.  Learn what’s possible, and show me what you’ve done!

For the winners, either Tamar or I should be contacting you, but you can also shoot me an e-mail at jesse@staynalive.com and I’ll arrange to get you a copy of FBML Essentials.

If you would like help customizing your Facebook Page please don’t hesitate to contact me and arrange a consultation.  Congrats to the winners!