I was at a local restaurant tonight, and I was talking with someone about why I don’t enjoy visiting most MySpace sites. MySpace is the most popular social networking site and rivals GeoCities on how easy it is for personal website creation and how creative you can create a website without real website experience. What I do not enjoy about most MySpace pages is how loud and terribly designed they can become and how they most often resemble the GeoCities pages of the mid to late 90′s. If you take a look at 90% of the websites on MySpace, you will notice that they have extremely cluttered backgrounds of some collage of pictures that make it crazy-insane to attempt to read any text on the screen, animated GIF’s for that cute barking puppy, extremely bad color choices, audio from who knows what band, and the <BLINK> tag!
Don’t get me wrong, you can easily spend an hour finding a really, really good pretty good looking page on MySpace, like for example Mike Industries’s page (even John McCain likes his designs), but even then you have to conform to MySpace’s general layout. Doing a quick local search results in pages that look like garbage. I looked at a total of 8 pages; the other three didn’t have the default layout changed.
Maybe someone can inform me why anybody would want to make their pages look so terrible? Or rather it’s that they don’t know that their designs are <#?
I don’t claim to be any sort of design guru, it’s by far what I struggle with the most in the context of web design; this is why I use nice looking templates created by someone else. For anybody that has a MySpace page that may find their way to this article, let me point out a few design tips.
- Don’t use a picture as your background
- It is generally a bad idea to use a picture as your background. It often makes reading any text on the screen very difficult if done improperly (which you will do improperly if you are taking design tips from me). And using a solid background color for where text is, to increase the readability because of the background picture, is like placing a book under a newly made desk because you cut one leg two inches too short; it may solve the immediate problem of a wobbly desk, but it looks ugly and should have been fixed in a different way.
- Animated pictures (GIF’s) are the devil
- Hell, people thought animated GIF’s were a bad idea 10 years ago.
- The color wheel is your friend
- If you can’t choose complementing colors from the color wheel, at least use a color scheme generator. If you wouldn’t wear the same colors on your clothing, then you shouldn’t put them on your website.
Anybody else know of some other good tips?
One Response to “MySpace Rant”
I totally agree. Not only to people abuse the customization “feature,” it’s a complete hack that it works anyway. To customize a page, it’s not like you select a theme with a nice interface, you go to some other website that generates a ton of inline css to overwrite the default settings. Then the user posts it in some “location” or “about me” section of their page. It’s a mess.
The “dashboard” itself is horrible as well. I always get text or javascript something-or-others overlapping critical information. I can never find the control I’m looking for even after having used it for ears. Their servers go down all the time.
To tell you the truth… I think the only reason it got popular is because high school kids wanted something like facebook. There’s no reason it should be as popular as it is. It’s a complete fluke.