10 Ways to Improve Your Myspace Page

I've be doing web design for a while now and after a few years of making tons and tons of web pages with different designs, layouts and content, I've learned a few things about looks. Some web design gets pretty in depth, and largely depends on several factors including audience, your content, and how to attract visitors. However, there are some simple things you should know about building a Myspace page even if you're a beginner. There's a lot of mistakes that the average user makes and should reconsider when thinking about the visitors that are viewing their page.

1. Easy on the images. Many Myspace users make the mistake of putting way too many images on their pages. Don't get me wrong, images look cool and a are great way to express yourself, but if you don't want your page to take more than 10 minutes to load, use less images. As an alternative, use smaller images, or even thumbnails that link to much bigger images. Try adding captions to your images rather than supplementing them with more graphics. It looks cleaner, it loads faster, and provides more unique information about yourself.

2. Align your content correctly. There are too many Myspace pages out there that look like all the content was shifted to the left or right way too much. Some web browsers render pages differently, and will cause everything to look messed up, disjointed and out of portion or laid out in a weird way. Keep it simple, start with a basic layout and work your way up. Try viewing your page in other browsers like FireFox or Opera, and don't forget Safari for Macs. Trust me, if you put the effort into making this look good, it'll go a long way and you'll impress a lot of your visitors.

3. BE UNIQUE! Of course, with the wide variety of stuff you can add to your page, it's hard not to be unique. However, there are lots of themes, clip art, sound files, and other types of media that get used over and over again. PLEASE avoid this as much as possible. No one likes a Myspace page that has the same annoying content as the thousands of other similar pages out there. You spend a lot of time on your page making it look good, so take time to come up with some of your own stuff. Learn to use Adobe Photoshop or some other image editing software to create your own work. It looks cool, it expresses your abilities, and maybe even others will want to follow in your footsteps and ask if they can use it as well.

4. Background choice. If you choose to put an image as the background on your Myspace page, make sure that it works in conjunction with your text. What I mean by this is that you don't want a dark colored background with dark colored text, or light colored background with light colored text... if you do this, no one can read it! Make sure the colors and themes of your site compliment each other. There are plenty of resources on the web that teach you how to do this correctly. Some of the visitors to your Myspace page may have lower quality monitors, or be in a extremely dark or lit room and they won't be able to read your page because of poor color choice. This is all a part of the design choices you make for your Myspace page. Stand a few steps away from your computer monitor and see if you can still read it. Step closer... can you still read it? Does the text need to be bigger? Does it need to be brighter or darker? Think about how your visitors are going to react if they can't read anything on your Myspace page.

5. Organization. Don't throw all your stuff onto one page. Categorize your content. For example, instead of putting all your pictures on the front page... put them in your album and put one image link on the main page that links to the album. If you have another website, consider linking to that instead. Don't spread stuff out randomly, either. Put all your information about yourself on one side, put your favorite music on the other, put quotes in one section, macros/templates in another. Also consider the placement of your content. If you want all your visitors to see a certain picture or block of text, put it near the top instead of at the bottom. Remember that different people have different screen sizes and can't always view all your stuff at once. They may need to scroll down in order to view certain aspects of your Myspace page that would have otherwise gone ignored.

Those are just a few things you can do to improve your Myspace page. There are a ton of other tutorials out there that show you how to make it look cool, add fun stuff, and even templates to get you started. These above tips should be heavily considered, as many Myspace users don't think about them and their page ends up looking really bad. Don't do this. Take special care of your page so it looks good and impresses all your friends!