I have one theory as to the popularity of Myspace. I believe the chief attraction is the user-friendly method in which ordinary folks can enjoy the thrill of becoming a graphic designer (when it comes to putting their profile together). Even my parents could probably figure out how to make a snazzy background and splash it up with some glitter graphics. A website designer would need to at least learn a little bit about html coding, whereas a complete newbie can probably design a Myspace profile that would compete with the best of them.



This is largely due to the existence of free Myspace resource sites. These are all over the web; just Google something like "Myspace graphics" and you will have pages of them to choose from. What these Myspace resource sites typically provide are graphics for designing profiles, presented in an easy "copy and paste" format. (The better ones provide simple instructions for those of us who have no idea what "code" even refers to.)

OK, so you want to see what all the fuss is about and give Myspace a test drive. The first thing you need to do is open an account. To do this you need to provide an email account and choose a password. That's it, you're in the door.

The next thing you should do is upload a picture of yourself. It doesn't have to be your latest photo; your high school senior picture will do just fine. Or a picture of anything you want. I saw one of Jack in the Box once. (I wonder if that was really Jack?)

Now you can move forward to your empty, blank profile. Choose "edit profile" and you will be taken to the main profile editing screen. Here you can tell the world about yourself. More importantly, this is where you can paste the html codes that you copied from a resource site to customize the look of your profile. To get the best effects, you should combine a background with a "layout generator," or just go with a complete ready-made layout. The general consensus is that your background and/or layout graphics codes should be pasted into your About Me section, after whatever text you want to type in that is "about you."

But any of these fields will take html code and display the intended image. So you can paste photos, images, animated gifs, and the like into any of these sections. For example, you can paste an animated gif image of superman flying in the Heros field. The only other section you really need to mess with is the "basic info" link on the submenu at the top. This will take you to a list of fields where you can type the personal information that you want people to see about you, which will appear next to your photo. This includes age, gender, city and state, and other optional fields such as smoker, drinker, and body type. (The basic info questions will not accept html code.)

Keep in mind that when you click back to your Home page, that is not your profile page. Meaning, this is more of a control panel page where you can navigate to different functions such as accepting friend requests and sending messages. If you want to see the actual results of your profile editing, that is, your actual profile that everyone else will see, simply click on "profile."