Building an easy and free Facebook Fan page



Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru... Image via CrunchBase


You know those awesome looking Facebook fan pages - the ones the big companies have with the fabulous graphics and special offers?

I like those. I wanted one of those. I am NOT a coder.

I started hearing about some companies that were providing the service of helping you easily set up pages like those so I started investigating. I found two that were easy to use and that had free options:  Pagemodo and iFrame Engine.

Both were pretty easy to use, but Pagemodo came out a bit ahead for me. I didn’t spend extensive amounts of time trying to figure them out, so you get my “I don’t have time to waste on figuring this out” review on both of these :)

Pagemodo

Here is the page I created with Pagemodo.

How it works:

You can pick for about 8 free templates.  With a paid account you can get more functionality (like video) as well as more pages (the free account will only let you have one page and it has a fair amount of pagemodo advertising on it.) What I wished it had was the ability to make some of the links clickable and the zooming in and out of the images seemed to make them blurry.

I made a video of how to build the page here: Building a pagemodo page

iFrame Engine

Here is the page I created with iFrame Engine

This app doesn’t seem to have the same kind of templates to choose from so you build your page from scratch and it doesn’t seem to be as easy to have multiple boxes on one page.  It does have a reveal page function which is cool though - a page you upload that covers the regular content until someone likes your page.  I think this functionality would be be very useful if you have special content you were promising to only Facebook fans.

I couldn’t figure out how to have the page not be called iFrame Engine which was a definite down point for me.

Here’s the video of me building a page in iFrame Engine.

What do you think? Would you use a service like this? Have you? Would you pay for one?