Ok I’ve been playing with MySpace more now because one of the projects I am working on is for a local bar wanted their presence on the web. Well I had a website all made up for them, but after talking to the GM of the building a bit more he wanted to go with a MySpace page so that people could add their page to their friends list etc. He also believed it would be easier to maintain than something I could create (which isn’t true but whatever).
Anyway, I’ve never really used MySpace for anything because I have my own space so I am totally new to skinning a MySpace layout and have been Googling about how to do it. There are tons of template/layout sites out there with the most popular being Pimp-My-Profile.com. After much reading of various templates’ code and seeing that you can create <div> tag overlays I have concluded that MySpace is even worse then I though.
Why do I not like the way MySpace works?
Well you might have heard the marketing phrase Web2.0 and that MySpace is one of those types of sites out there on the Interweb. Well in my opinion, one of the items that a Web2.0 website should follow is the coding standards that it uses. If they use HTML, CSS etc, they should follow the proper coding standards for those sites; MySpace does not.
If you have ever played with a MySpace layout you’ll noticed that it has some quirks to the way it works the one main thing is that it is all built on nester tables. That’s right, it’s all nested tables and that isn’t the best way to make a website, in-fact since CSS become more widely used, tables should not be used for website layouts, period! Leave tables for tabular data not for design. CSS does a much better job and loads faster.
Now MySpace does use CSS to help with some of the formatting but it isn’t standard CSS and seems to break some of the rules that would normally wreak havoc on normal websites.
When using hex values you cannot put in the # symbol because MySpace seems to strip it out when you save your settings. So you need to do it like color: ffffff; which took me forever to figure out why my font colours weren’t working properly. You also can’t do short hand CSS either like: color: #fff; it breaks on that as well and I like to use web-safe colours most of the time.
So those are the two main reasons why I dislike MySpace. MySpace templates are just hacks to make things more unique. Yes it is nice that MySpace allows this, but I think it would be easier and better to skin your MySpace profile if they ditched the tables for <div> tags. If they incorporated aJax into the mix then you could then rearrange your sections on your profile to even more unique.
For those who are interested in skinning their MySpace page to make it more unique and interesting, pop over to Pimp-My-Space.com and look through the hundreds of templates they offer to use.
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RosieMay 25, 2007 at 15:15:41
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I hate MySpace! It’s ugly and lame. I only have account there so I can read blogs of people who choose to blog there. On occasion I use it to keep in touch with a couple of people.
johnMay 26, 2007 at 12:34:23
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I couldn’t agree more with you!
myspace is lame, stupid and unusefull!
but this is the type of sites these days…arcade games, proxies and myspace shit!
cheers,
Tyler IngramMay 28, 2007 at 10:10:07
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Well it isn’t entirely useless. I know people who use it because it allows them to ‘friend’ their other friends. I also know a couple of bands that love it because people can ‘friend’ them and such.
The bar that I did their myspace for loves it and its not too hard to update the information on it, it was just a bit difficult to figure out how the layouts worked.
Though I still think with the pricing of hosting a website starting at $5 a month, MySpace is not the answer to give you a good unique identity on the web. That and I never really thought MySpace layouts looked professional.
Oh well if the client wants it, the client gets it
guilhermeMay 29, 2007 at 16:06:51
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i don’t likee myspace too… here in Brazil everybody have an Orkut, a social network by google