A client of mine asked me if I could go in and customize their MySpace profile. Figuring I’d just be entering some hex codes into input boxes, I agreed to help out. 3 frustrating hours later, I’ve succeeded in doing noooooooothing! There is no theme management or customization type area. In order to change the style, you have to enter a hacked and slashed version of html and css into any of the boxes that contain your information.
Obviously, customization was an after-thought… and they really shouldn’t have bothered with it. The profile pages (or at least the band profiles) are a disgusting mess of nested tables and I actually thought I had traveled back in time to 1997 while viewing the source – yes, it’s that bad! Each table cell having a background colour attribute set to white – which you later override using…
table {background-color: transparent;}
Notice the formatting there… you are forced to do that as it doesn’t seem to recognize proper css formatting.
Oh – the best part! You can’t use the pound (#) sign, at all! Amazing! It replaces it with .. after you publish.
I’ve never bothered with MySpace – even after a few invites from friends. Every time I clicked the link to check out their profile, it just looked like an old school Angelfire site. No thanks.
I wonder if there are any of these types of sites that have decent templates. Look at how well Blogger‘s doing and they went down the right path… having the leading standards and css designers do their templates.
Anyway, don’t use MySpace. But if you do… don’t try and customize it. That’s 3 hours I’ll never get back.