Website Design

MySpace is a social networking website offering interaction with a network of friends.

Myspace is also an ugly, extremely hard to work with website, that is about the furthest thing I’ve ever seen from being user friendly. Everything about Myspace is annoying from the ads, the music player, the layout and the lack of usability.

So why has it become so popular?

I don’t think people go to ugly websites just because their ugly.

In my personal opinion one of the reasons that MySpace became so popular is that they allowed the user to create their on personal web page as well as upload music to those pages.

These web pages are not like blogs where you update the site everyday but are personal pages with pictures, links to your favorite sites and information about you.

Myspace allows you to easily create a web page and more advanced Myspace users have started hacking the system and are able to add  html and CSS. This adds both depth and credibility as a Myspace user. Myspace members see these custom pages as real web designing and Myspace does not seem to mind the hacking of their system. Which in turn has caused the culture to grow.

It’s also easy to add music to your web page and is one of the few ways you can legally share music with others. Myspace also allowed promoters and even encouraged them to promote events on the Myspace website.

This caused musicians to start joining the site to create a place to promote themselves as well as a place to point fans to. This caused a lot of people that follow music to follow the musicians and people that follow people to follow people.

Myspace allows these people to run wild and free with very little limitations on what they can and can’t do. This has allowed Myspace to grow and once it started growing it became the cool place to be.

Members are willing to over look the bad navigation, bugs, ugly design and the many other problems with Myspace so they can hang with the cool crowd.

Done correctly most any business is able to gain traffic and financial benefits from Myspace.

SMO is not about getting a number one ranking on the search engines but more about building a site worth talking about. The end goal is not only getting traffic from forums, blogs, Digg and other Social Media places but building a name for yourself as well.To give you and idea of how this works, I’ll explain a little about how to make money using forums.

1. Have your heart in the right place. Post on forums to help people and not to promote your own business. The business will come but don’t look for it.

2. Everyone knows more about something then you do. Try and learn something from everyone you meet. Don’t put anyone done, they could be a potential client.

3. Always try and improve your website. You should not be making self promotional post on forums, you’ve got one shot to make the sell and that’s through your website. Always try and improve your design, text, logo and images as well as the way your site operates.

If your going to make money on forums your website needs to be the best, there is a lot of competition.

4. Debates are good but never let them get personal.

5. Bad information, I think a lot of people post bad information just to get people posting on a topic they started. I would never do this, it not only makes you look bad but also causes people to become confused about the topic being talked about.

At the end of the day you end up with links pointing to your site from forums, blogs and other websites talking about something you’ve said or done.

This helps your website rank in the search engines not because of link exchanges or submitting your site to directories but because you were out helping someone.

When your website does rank it’s the best it can be, you’ve been improving it everyday to help sell your product or service, while your competition has been submitting there site to directories and doing link exchanges.

You’ve also been making money from day one instead of worrying about the search engines and were you rank.

People need to forget about the search engines and start learning how to make money online.