MySpace Layout Design

Just as with all other promotional materials, the look of your MySpace page in design, organization, and even color can influence a fan’s perception of you and your music as much as the actual content contained within the site itself. To maximize the aesthetic value of your page, however, you simply need a few basic web tools and an understanding of which design choices are effective and which can sabotage one of your most valuable promotional engines.

The layout, or background of your page, is widely considered to be the most basic and vital feature. This belief is due in part to its effect on the content placed above it, but also because the background image, depending on its file size, can drastically warp your page’s parameters and lengthen its loading time. Layouts can be created with generators, which enable you to choose colors, fonts, background preferences, and other formatting options through an easy-to-use website program. Thomas’ MySpace Editor is the popular choice among users (available at www.strikefile.com/myspace), but there are countless programs just like it offering all the same features. You simply run through the prompts and, when finished, are provided with a lengthy code which you copy and paste into the "About Me" or band bio section of your profile. As seen above, you are able to customize your background color, as well as add a background photo (for which you will need the image URL). Be careful during this step to choose a photo that has small dimensions (not over 600 pixels wide), as a larger image could stretch the borders of your page and subsequently push content off screen. All other customizable features available online, such as glitter and tweaks, utilize the same method of pasting codes. When choosing a background color and/or image, be sure to pick one with a low-contrast (meaning dark) on which you can print a broader array of font colors and images. Also, knowing some basic HTML coding can further the cleanliness and appeal of your page. To place pictures in your frontpage profile, simply copy the picture’s URL (this can be found wherever the picture is being hosted), paste it into your profile, and, as discussed last month, place <img src=“ in front of the URL and then close off the code with ”> at the end. You may also have noticed that the paragraph breaks in your profile do no show up when the page is created. By placing <p> in the text where you would like paragraph breaks, however, you can achieve the desired effect and have your page look more professional.

MySpace, for all its brilliance, suffers from dramatic operability issues and filling your page with a bevy of flashy features will hinder the rate at which your page loads. Given that the general purpose of MySpace is to have instant access to music, pictures, and more, you may very well be losing fans in the time it takes your page to spring up and load your songs.