Welcome to the Malevolent Myspaces, where I, John Havlik, show examples of awful web designs on people’s Myspace profiles. While preparing this issue, Firefox locked up due to someone’s terrible Myspace, so let’s begin.

Today’s victim is “Love Never Dies” from some town in Tennessee. She thinks it is fun to put multimedia content on her page that isn’t handled by a standard plug-in (Acrobat reader, Flash, Shockwave, Java, QuickTime, and Windows Media are considered standard.). Since I use Firefox I get a nice “missing plug-in” banner at the top.

This person uses CSS to crowd her details together next to her “Myspace angles” picture. This renders the city name almost unreadable at first glance. Not using padding, or using negative padding to overlap more than two lines of text is very bad, it looks bad and hinders readability. There is no reason to overlap more than two lines of text in a title, or normal readable text.

She also thinks that having those sparkly backgrounds is cool. These may seem cool, and they are, for three-year-olds and people with ADD/ADHD. Distraction is the problem and the moving shiny glitter will attract the attention of the readers instead of the real content of the page. It’s in everyone’s best interest if there isn’t glittery images, text, etc. on a Myspace unless the owner doesn’t want anything to be read, but then why have a Myspace?

Marquees are also very popular with this user; she has two on the top part of the screen that kept bouncing around. Marquees should have died years ago, I’d rant about it but I’ve better pages to scrutinize.
Mysterious plug-in refuses to load, and fails to properly tell Firefox what plug-in is missing. A little bird whispers that it should be a video file of some sort, which leads to another broken rule; never embed audio/video files into your pages unless there is an easy way to stop the file from playing, and by default the file shouldn’t start playing. Ninety percent of Myspace pages have either a song play, or have a video with sound play. Some even have both playing which is even more aggravating, not only wasting bandwidth but the two sounds compete with each other, which sounds awful. Most internet users are already listening to music on a separate media player and they don’t need another song to impede their listening, unless they wish to hear it. So respect the visitor and don’t place embedded audio/video files on a Myspace page. Instead add a hyperlink directly to the file, a dedicated page for the file, or to maybe a pop-up of the audio/video player.

When designing a webpage it is always in the designer’s best interest to keep a good contrast between text and the background, and most importantly Hyperlinks should jump out as such, and not a hide-and-seek game to find them as they are on Love Never Dies’ profile. Also never, ever, change the mouse cursor from its natural look for the web browser, this users had it changed to a + on hyperlinks. Mouse trail effects aren’t cool either; they tend to crash browsers and show the immaturity of the designer. Above is an image with every curser on the normal Windows XP installation, with all of the cursers that shouldn’t be seen on a normal webpage crossed out.

Feel free to comment on this, if you have suggestions for future MMs, and any other things you think suck about the Myspace featured in MMs #1.

Only you can prevent crappy Myspace pages.

8 Days Remaining

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]