The Sidejob has a redesign concept of the Myspace.com home page. In my opinion, the concept of Myspace is great. The actual coding of the site and reliability could be worked on. Of course I’ve never had to deal with a site as large as this, but I can still ask questions and maybe give some suggestions.
As a lot of you know out here in California its ridiculously hot. I went to Vegas a couple of weeks ago and I really couldn’t tell the difference between Vegas and the hot weather here in the Bay Area. So why am I bringing this up. Well because it’s so hot, people are drawing more energy to stay cool and a results of this are blackouts in certain areas. Myspace.com had a blackout in their server house the last few days and they have admitted that the site is not functioning correctly.
You would think a site of that size and customer base would consider doing some sort of failover/co-location scheme. I think they make/earned enough money to be able to do something like that. They definitely have enough of an excuse to offer what we call in the server industry “5-nines” which means 99.999% uptime which equals to about a little less than an hour all year. This includes any downtime for server maintenance. It’s pretty much the bottom line and its a standard that I think most people strive to meet.
Besides the servers going down, there are constant errors on the page. I could blame Windows servers and ASP but I think its more of how it’s coded than the platform of choice. We could argue about it for a long time but that’s just another thing I thought I would bring up.
So on to the redesign. The user interface could be a lot easier to use. Besides that moving toward a Web 2.0 model if done well could save a lot of bandwidth and hits on their machines reducing more and more errors. The only problem with the conversion as one user commented in the article is since Myspace allows its users to customize their pages converting the template code of a user would most likely kill the existing customization of the users pages and they would have to redo all of them. I don’t think this would make their customers very happy.
So back to the post, the redesign of the home page. I have to say when I use Myspace, I hardly ever go to the home page. I will review the mock design of The Sidejob anyway for the sake of Myspace taking the concept and somehow doing something like this throughout their site. What they could do is have both versions and slowly transition users based on a preference.
Utilizing sIFR does allow for cleaner fonts throughout the page. This is a common technique used by web designers. It utilizes flash and in this case there are quite a few flash elements in MySpace already so its not too big of a deal worrying if it will work for a user or not.
I agree that the navigation has too many elements in it. Most of which I don’t really use on a regular basis. I think the options he chose are pretty good. What would be even nicer is if the user could choose which elements to have on the navigation, then I can have only the ones I use on a regular basis.
Overall I think the designer added some good Web 2.0 style to the design. It looks much cleaner but I think in general has too much going on in the page. I think technology and news sites are more catered to cluttered pages where the users are more savvy and want as much as possible thrown at them at one time. Since the audience of Myspace is more toward the young adult, while some my be technologically savvy such as myself, I know the majority of people in my friends list are not.
All in all I think it is a big improvement of what is there. What I would like to see is more stability on the web application. I know they have a lot of users, but they also have a lot of money to work with. Stability both in their server implementation as well as the code itself. That’s just on my wish list and I’m sure it’s had to have crossed the minds of the people at Myspace.
