by Alan Galatian

Created on: July 25, 2009

MySpace is a fantastic place to meet new people, keep up with your friends and express yourself. By now you've likely visited pages of your favorite bands and artists and seen lots of cool page layouts. In the spirit of expressing yourself, you'd like to spice your own page up a little. Here are some instructions on how to build your own layout.

This tutorial is assuming you do not know Cascading Style Sheets programming, or CSS. The tutorial walks you through the use of the MySpace Customize 2.0 feature.

Once you are logged in you will move your mouse over Profile on the main menu. Then click on Customize Profile. You will find yourself under the Select Theme category of the Appearance section. From here you will select the theme that you like best. You'll find themes categorized by Sports, Nature, Movies & TV, and more.

After you have selected the theme you like best, click on Change Layout to change the width of the page and the layout. This option gives you increased control over the arrangement of your modules, such as music players, picture slide shows and more. Now is a good time to point out that you can get a sneak peek of your page by clicking on the Preview button.

The next selection on the Appearance section is Advanced Edit. Here is where you control the attributes of the page, such as Background, Content, Modules, Module Headers, and Module Headers.

The Background attribute allows you to choose a background color and a background image of your choice. To assign an image, the image must be hosted on another website. You can then choose if the background will scroll with the page, the position of the image, and if the image will repeat and how.

The Content and Module attributes control the inner content body and module sections of the page and also allows you to colors and images in the same manner as the background settings. In addition, you are given control over the size, color and padding of the borders.

The Module Headers and Module Bodies options give the same controls as the Background attribute, except that text control is added. This is where you will name your modules and choose text colors and font styles. If you don't like what you see, you can always click on Reset Styles.

The the next section is CSS. This area allows you to add CSS scripting to your page for greater control over your page, but we will not get into detail on this. If you would like to learn CSS programming you can visit W3Schools.com. They offer free lessons on various web programming languages.

The final category is Modules and is very simple. This is where you add more modules to your page or remove them. You can choose to add a calender, music and video players, blogs, and more.

Once you have made your selections, click on the Preview button one more time to make sure everything is just right. If you like what you see, click on the Publish button to show off your new layout to the world; or just your friends.

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