Myspace Layout Tips: Care About Your Space

With more than 90 million the internet's most visited destination is also its most poorly designed. The kicker is that Myspace encourages millions of people to create badly designed websites. I will show you some of the worst Myspace sites and explain what is wrong with them from a design point of view. Then I will give you simple easy rules to follow that will allow you to create a "space" that is more pleasing to the eye.

These sites are listed in no particular order. They are just bad sites; and bad sites do not need ordering. Clicking on the links will open a new window.

Site #1

Wrong: Pictures Size, Bad Background, Transparent Tables

Site #2

Wrong: Size of pictures, Color Scheme, Music

Site #3

Wrong: EVERYTHING

We're just going to stop with those three because, honestly, my eyes are bleeding. It seems as though the thought with myspace is that "More is Better", and more of the gaudiest pictures, backgrounds and color schemes is better.

It does not help when an individuals myspace friends almost always make the comment "Great Site" when they leave a comment. Friends, you are lying! How can you call yourself a friend? Even if it is just a myspace friend.

If you wish to create a page that you want people to visit regularly, then you should create one that will bring people back. Myspace users have forgotten that returning visitors are created by content. Or maybe they've just forgotten what content actually means.

Content refers to the actual purpose for your website. If you're writing blogs or a diary, then that is your content. If you are a fan of something, then your content should pertain to that. The amount of pictures and music and videos on a myspace page is outrageous. I saw one page that contained 6 YouTube videos, and 4 music files. That's not mentioning the amount of oversized pictures that were placed in various areas of the website.

The trick to web design, ANY web design, is quality content. Not quantity content. This goes true for myspace design as well. Even tho you may be able to copy and paste the coding for a layout provided by someone else, a myspace user would do him/her-self justice by learning a little HTML so that they can edit that layout for themselves. To be completely honest, I've never found a myspace layout theme that I've really liked. The people that provide them should take a course or two in HTML as well.

A myspace site should not contain more than one video or music player. In your options, there are settings to not automatically play your videos and your music. Please use them. No, I'm serious. Please Use Them.

Videos and music severely kill the load time of a page. For those people that like to plaster videos and music all over their page need to understand this. There are still people in this world that have to use dial-up internet access. There is nothing else available to them. Imagine if you have dial-up access and you tried to access your horribly video and music ridden myspace page. Tomorrow, it might actually be fully loaded.

Pictures. Everyone loves pictures on their page. Everyone seems to like BIG pictures on their page. These pictures cause the width of the page to extend beyond the window boundaries and thus viewers have to scroll left and right to actually view your page. This is a very big no-no in web design. Please resize your pictures. If you care about your page, you'll do it. The proper codes to use is [img src="http://location of your image" width="size of width" height="size of height"]. Change the [ ] for < >. I've done this so you can see the coding. You will need to adjust the width and height until your picture size is correct and does not cause the page to extend.

As an alternative solution, you can use width=80 height=80 and create a thumbnail picture, then you can link this picture to the larger one in this fashion: a href="location of your picture" Enclose that with < >The Code Above< > and the last brackets you type /a inside. Using this solution, you can create smaller pictures on your website and for people that actually care about the picture, they can link and view the larger picture.

Background pictures are great. Just not when you have a background picture that repeats its self over and over again to fill the page. It really is best just to use a plain colored background. In terms of load time, it's instant. Remember, think of that person on dialup waiting to view your myspace page when the first picture that loads is the background. This means that if you've abused the use of pictures on your page, the viewer can do nothing until the background is loaded. Then at least they can eat popcorn while they wait for your other pictures to load, like it's some kind of suspense movie. Most of all, if you use a background picture, do not use transparent tables. That is just the worst example of design negligence I can think of.

The last item to mention is the use of color schemes and text. Most color schemes involve two distinct colors. Your text should never match either of these colors unless you are using non-transparent tables. Why? Because look at the sites listed above. In one especially the text matches the Colts color scheme and when you scroll over (because they commited that sin of extending past the window borders) you see that the text matches the blue and you cannot read it. After all, you want people to actually read what you write, do you not?

Using these simple strategies will definitely help you design a better myspace page. If you want to stand out on myspace there is a lot more information that can help you, but at the very least you should commit these tips to memory. Write down the codes in a txt file and save them. Those codes may save you from embarrassment.