Like most I'll do a Google search when I'm making a new Facebook cover photo to find the dimensions. Most sites will tell you what Facebook themselves tell you, it's 851px x 315px and these have been the dimensions I have used when creating cover photo's for our client pages. However, I recently uploaded a personal photo to my own profile and was surprised to see that within the mobile view on an iPhone app it shows more height if it's available. So my recommendation now would be to add an image of at least 851 pixels wide but include more height to cater for the new mobile view (see grab below) ... … [Read more...]

I read that Facebook had settled a lawsuit with five users whose profiles were being used in advertising on the site. The 'sponsored stories' facility allows brands to use your photo's and names if you have 'liked' the product. The problem is that some people don't actually want their likes known to everyone, especially If your face is showing up as liking something like Partypoker and you might not want people to know this. When you 'like' a product on Facebook, you are declaring your allegiance to that company, and giving your consent for your name to be used to endorse the product in an advert. I don't notice any disclaimers when I like certain companies or brands as I want to keep up … [Read more...]

Last year a new privacy law came into effect in the EU that requires website owners to get permission BEFORE they plant web cookies (or any technology for storing information) on a visitors machine. This has MASSIVE implications for not only businesses but for bloggers and personal website owners too as the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has the power to slap you with a penalty of up to 500k! Everyone had a year to get their ducks cookies in a row. So here we are, a couple of days away from the impending doom of the deadline and it seems that there are still a heck of a lot of large websites not complying to this new law - mainly because no-one seems to understand what's going on … [Read more...]

Google are taking it social and you might wonder why some search results are now showing the author of the result and others are not (this is different to the "Richard Mackney shared this" that you might see if you follow me). In the above example Edgar Cervantes is clearly attributed with writing the post and his Google+ avatar appears under the result. This also applies to YouTube video search results - you can see below that Phil Campbell is listed as the author.   If you want to appear in results in this way then you need to ensure that all of your profiles have verified authorship and that means cross linking your Google+, YouTube and Blog.   Firstly, … [Read more...]