Adding an Image to Your Myspace Background

When you're creating a customized Myspace layout, you'll want to pay special attention to your background image. It's often one of the first things a visitor sees when they go to your page, kind of like the front door to your house. You want to make sure that front door is as pleasing and welcoming as possible so the visitor will want to step through it, not scream and flee as fast as they can. No matter what the rest of your profile looks like, is you don't have a well-coordinated background no one will ever see what the rest of it looks like, nor will they care.

As backgrounds come, Myspace is pretty versatile and gives you tons of options. You can find a ready-made background online for free or for pay, or you can take some time and create your own. The latter offers more possibilities, giving you greater control over the details such as tables, position and appearance. Background color will also be important, as it will determine the readability of your text.

Myspace backgrounds are micromanaged through the "edit my profile" section, so you have a great amount of freedom (even moreso if you have advanced knowledge of HTML and Flash.) The default setup will have the background in, well, the background, with tables and text covering it up. For most people this setup is satisfactory, but recently some non-conformists have decided to buck the trend and make the table transparent-thereby letting the background show through the table and become a more prominent feature of the profile. You can hide, emphasize or move tables to accommodate your background, depending how much of it you want your visitors to see.

You're able to pick whether you want a solid background or an image, but the overwhelming majority of Myspace users who customize their profile page choose to include an image of some sort. While a color background requires only an HTML hex code, the procedure is a little different for a background image: in the "About Me" section of your profile, you need to include the web address where your hosted picture is located. The picture can only be .jpg or .gif format, less than 600k, and can only have a file name made up of letters and numbers-no punctuation marks or symbols. You can decide if you just want the picture itself in the background, or if you want to tile it (repeat the picture so it fills the viewer's screen) horizontally or vertically. If you really want to get detailed and have more extensive programming knowledge you can even position the picture in the exact spot you want it (i.e. top, center, bottom, right or left, or at certain coordinates). Once you've taken care of those specifics, you can turn to the borders and tables of your page, determining the specs for each; many people who create custom Myspace pages for copying also include tables, borders and even fonts that bring a uniform look or a "theme" to the site. If you don't have the time or experience to add such details to your background, there are a number of online Myspace profile page generators to assist you in creating a background to suit your taste. If you ask nicely, there are also a number of people in the Myspace community who will gladly help personalize your profile for you.

While the most important factor in your Myspace profile is you, a background image goes a long way in showing the world who you are. The phrase "a picture's worth a thousand words" is true now just as it was back then, and a well-chosen image will help attract the community of like-minded people you're hoping to find.