BECAUSE I CAN: Customizing my MySpace

Posted: January 27th, 2008 at 11:45 am | Tags: webdesign

I decided to redesign my MySpace because the last layout was getting too “AzN pRiNcEsS” and girly. This is actually the third time I’v tackled the the jungle of code that is MySpace. First time was for work, and second time was that Asian princess layout. The previous layout is on the left and the new one is on the right.

Everybody knows that I consider MySpace to be the ghetto of social websites but I’ve got to admit that it is useful to keep in touch with bands and with the 1% of the internet population that aren’t on Facebook. Out of the 25 friends I have, only 2 of them are actual people I’ve met and the rest are bands.

Unfortunately, MySpace feels that iit can do whatever it want and ignore best practices and common sense. For example, it took me ten minutes (which is forever in Internet time) to figure out how to change my profile pic because of the dumb user interface. Sometimes I’m tempted to do a redesign of the MySpace user interface but what would the point be? Anyway, I don’t want the people behind MySpace to steal my work.

[CAUTION: DESIGN SNOBBERY] Also, MySpace allows users to break best practices for design. For most cases you don’t break the grid or else the layout looks messy but I’ve seen alot of people post 500 px wide pics in columns meant to hold only 300 px wide of content.

Sometimes you can get away with posting content wider than the column, if you don’t make it obvious that the columns on the page are columns. Alas, MySpace uses TABLES to house content. Tables that are like two levels deep, which leads to confusing CSS, which in turn scares away the people that can make MySpace elegant and beautiful. Anyway, tables are a bit tricky to style and alot of people won’t take the time to understand how CSS applies to the TR and TD tags.

AND another thing, would it be so hard to restrict the width of the actual site? Not everyone had a screen that is a million pixels wide. An easy thing to do, would be to automatically resize images larger than a designated size. This would also alleviate broken grids found on many people’s pages.