Myspace.com has made some serious waves on the internet, offering thousands of people their own free sites where they can keep in touch with old buddies, find new friends, tell other people about themselves, and pretty much write the stories of their own lives.
Myspace has got areas for people in general just looking to meet new faces and exchange thoughts with others, but it also has its own little communities where people who have similar hobbies and interests can sit together and jam on forums. Some of the niche groups in myspace, for example, deal with skateboarding, and a lot of passionate skateboarders worldwide have joined myspace to meet with others of like hearts and minds.
If you’re a dedicated skateboarder and want to get in touch with your kindred spirits then try your hand at making your own entry at Myspace.com. Designing your own space is easy – there are dozens of reliable sources online where you can download codes, layouts, graphics, and music to spice up your personal page. Some of these are even dedicated to providing skateboarders with some good layouts for their myspace page.
However as any artist knows, just having the stuff to work with isn’t enough. You have to get creative and put your soul into something if you want people to stand up and take notice. Here are a few tips I mugged from friends who not only skateboard but do other stuff like music and graphics design. Maybe these examples will help you out, and spark your creative juices too.
Graphic Ideas – a webpage without graphics is a cake without icing, cherries, and chocolate flakes. Just plain boring. Whether it’s a picture of you and your girl set as the background, a splash of your favorite movie or anime character, or a photo of your beloved skateboard, your opening page has got to tell people who you are at a glance. As an example of creativity, one of my friends in the karate club used a picture for his background where he was the victim of a kick that literally sent him off the ground. Painful, but amusing to see. Another of my buddies did a self portrait charcoal sketch and scanned it for his space. If you can draw, paint, or do computer graphics you can do a lot in this department.
Music, Baby! – there’s a saying that Life Has a Soundtrack. Aside from the tunes you stick in your car when driving or in your CD player when you’re ripping on your skateboard, there are those tunes that just seem to play in the background from somewhere when Wierd Things happen in your life… If you know what I’m talking about, then this is one area where you can spice up the layout of your myspace page.
Photo and Video Galleries – this is where you can start getting funky. Setting up several photo galleries give people an insight into who you are and what you do. Some of the stuff I’ve seen my friends do include the following: Winning shots of all his skateboarding stunts and competitions, a Bloopers gallery showing every crash and burn on a board, a Skateboard collection (all of them personally tricked up and spraypainted with awesome designs), even a Tattoo Art gallery for one of our gang who skateboards, surfs, and owns a tattoo parlor down in the beach.
Blog your Stuff – lastly, this is the modern version of those cheesy leatherbound diaries we see distinguished gentlemen and genteel ladies use in those old movies. In the modern age, we blog stuff. Jot your experiences and ideas here from day to day, and your brain’s caffeine level is probably the only real limit to what you put here. You can rant, you can rave, you can brag about your latest accomplishments or post questions that your viewers may have an answer to (or a wisecrack, but them’s the breaks!). Some layouts for myspace also allow you to set up surveys for your friends to answer when they visit your page, allowing you to twist people’s heads up with strange questions that are best pondered when intoxicated…