Google Friend Connect Step by Step

Many bloggers and website owners are now using Google’s Friend Connect . If you’re not familiar with Friend Connect here are a few of the top features.

• Build your community

• Let visitors discover each other by joining your site with existing accounts from a variety of services.

• Increase engagement

• Choose engaging social features for your visitors from a catalog of social gadgets.

• No programming required

Copy and paste a few snippets of code into your site, and Friend Connect does the rest.

Today, I will walk you through the simple steps of setting up your Google Friend Connect Account.

1. Go to www.google.com/friendconnect and click “Get started”.

2. Click on “I agree to the Friend Connect Developer Terms of Service

3. Next, click on Friend Connect for Standard Websites, because we are going to place this information onto a Wordpress blog.

4. Now Friend Connect will walk you through the set-up process step by step. Click “Continue”.

5. Enter your site information (ie. your website or blog’s name), the URL of the home page (ie. www.mywebsite.com) and then choose  the language of your site from the drop down menu.

6. After you fill out the information in Step 5, you will see that you need to download and save 2 files. Download these 2 files and upload them to your website or blog server using FTP. Be sure to put the files into the right directory. Upload the files before proceeding.

7. We are almost done. Now to test to make sure Google Friend Connect is working properly, click on “Test to Finalize Setup”.

8. Now we need to add the members gadget to our website, so click on Get the code for the members gadget.

9. You can now customize the look and feel of your Friend Connect gadget. Within this section you can choose the size of your gadget, the coloration, create the HTML code and then upload it to your website or blog. When you are finished with the customization, click on “Generate Code”. Then upload as outlined in number 4. For example, you can use the code in a widget on your Wordpress blog.

10. After you enter the code onto your website or blog, you are finished.

You can see a completed example at http://www.googlemoxie.com.