jazz up your MySpace page (11/09/2007)
As the World Wide Web evolves, there are speculators and innovators everywhere trying to guess or invent the next big Internet craze. Recently, the online public's imagination has been fired by the likes of YouTube and MySpace - and it's the latter that GSP is concentrating on with its latest creativity package.
Yourplace for MySpace is a simple program that uses the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) language to modify the presentation of your MySpace page, or indeed any other personal Web page, although the templates and online help are all focused on MySpace. If you don't know what a style sheet is, and why it might possibly cascade, that's not a problem as everything is done via a series of straightforward menus with no technical know-how necessary.
The main screen is divided into two halves, with an Internet Explorer window on the left showing your page and the layout editor on the right. The core design process involves going through the various sub-menus of the layout editor, each of which concentrates on a different aspect of your MySpace page, such as the background and border, scrollbars, text and links. You can alter the font size, colours, the backgrounds of tables and their transparency, whether hyperlinks are underlined or get larger when hovered over, and other such basic details.
When you've made a change, a refresh button updates the look of the site in the left-hand IE window and also alters the CSS script in the background with your tweak. After you've finished with your layout, you simply copy the CSS code into the Windows clipboard by clicking a button, then paste it directly into your MySpace profile. A bit crude, yes, but it works well enough.
The template pages themselves feature some quite decent designs (among some dubious ones), although the table backgrounds provided aren't so impressive. Further customisation is possible, with fancier bits and pieces like a custom cursor and animated icons that fall down your page, although these look a bit rubbish.
There are a couple of more interesting facilities, such as the option to make a photo slide-show - though all the photos must be online, as the program works entirely with URLs, not files on your PC - plus you can choose from a few different kinds of scrolling text window to liven things up further.
This isn't going to make your MySpace page look like some work of art, by any means. Some of the effects are very basic and the templates vary quite widely in quality. Nevertheless it will help those who are clueless about Web design to do something a little more interesting with their personal site.
This is a pretty basic program at heart, but it's not bad value for money if you're a novice PC user who wants to jazz up their MySpace page a little.
Buy GSP Yourplace for MySpace securely online at a bargain price
£9.99 inc. VAT
GSP: 01480 496666
