Designing for MySpace June 18, 2007
The design of John Edwards’ MySpace page is pretty broken right now. As you’ll see below, page elements are getting pushed to the left and it is generally not looking as intended.
If a campaign website was messed up this bad we’d undoubtedly write something snarky. But, having done battle with MySpace ourselves, we can only feel sympathy for the folks at the Edwards’ campaign. They are fighting a losing battle.
If you design for MySpace, your page is pretty much guaranteed to break on occasion. Someone will post an 800 pixel wide picture in your comments. Or maybe a link that runs 1,000 pixels wide. You’ll post an update that mysteriously causes things to break. Or maybe MySpace will just make some subtle change that breaks your design for no reason.
For this reason, my favorite MySpace designs are ones that pretty much don’t look like MySpace pages. They get rid of the extraneous stuff and break free of the delicate two column MySpace design. These types of pages tend to be a bit more stable. Below are some examples:
Of course, they don’t really look like MySpace pages, which may not be the best strategy for a campaign. But they’ll keep the perfectionists charged with maintaining these pages a bit more sane.
Update: Jei Park, one of our designers, sent me the following note after reading this post:
I think Flight of the Conchords may have gotten special accounts/treatment. Most regular accounts have “bodyContent” class added to the body tag, but Conchords have “profile” added. Also when you look at their codes you don’t see any of the junk codes that should’ve been there, like “about me” since most people just hide them.
The fact that Flight of the Conchords seems to have removed advertising, which is against MySpace’s terms of services, is further proof of this.
