More and more, the Viget design team is taking on the arduous task of “customizing” the look of a MySpace page for a client or project. These aren’t new attempts—MySpace users have been trying for a long time to make their pages more their own from a design standpoint.  And, it makes total sense ... I mean, isn’t it a nice tie-in for Terrence Wallace’s or Ziggy Marley’s MySpace page to reflect the look of his official site? Sure, no question.

So, where’s the rub?

The problem lies with the fact that MySpace is terribly formatted/coded (nested table after nested table, limited ids and classes) and, therefore, doesn’t lend itself well to design customization. Granted, the original creators would probably argue that they never intended for design customization when they built MySpace; but, hopefully, its new owner (Rupert Murdoch/News Corp) and team already have “clean, customizable design and layout” at the top of their enhancements list.

Thanks to the efforts of fellow MySpace “explorers” like Mike Davidson, workarounds enable users to at least change background colors, header images, content box colors, and fonts, but little else is available in the way of significant enhancement. Sure, you’ll find lots of so-called MySpace templates available out there; but, upon closer inspection, you’ll see that they are all based off of a core group of limited design/code tweaks.

With clients having minimal budgets to put toward customized MySpace pages and the extreme limitations within which design changes can be made, this will continue to remain a “less-than-thrilling” (but still necessary) task that clients and designers undertake together. And, with each newly-customized MySpace page, we’ll chuckle together and say, “It’ll do.”

Let’s look forward to the time when clean formatting becomes a MySpace priority and when “My Space” also truly means “My Design.”