Would you blog on a site that didn’t allow you to customize the look of your blog?
I’m conflicted about this. Myspace was notorious for horrible looking profile pages but people seemed to like that option. Facebook on the other hand doesn’t let you customize anything and people seem to like that as well because you can always read everything and there is a consistent design.
Xanga lets you customize and there are been times peoples sites look horrible and unreadable and most other times they’re not.
Right now I’m building a site that allows blogging, but no customizing. I’m rethinking this aspect. But I know even xanga can be confusing when you’re on someones page and the navigation is all messed up.
No, I’m a fan of personalization. Facebook notes are dull for me in that respect, I like my blog to reflect me in some format.
I love being able to customize.. Some people just need to learn “what-not-to-do”.
I like to be able to customize, but I think xanga should not allow certain themes that don’t have the same features as the common canned themes do. For instance, have you ever clicked on a blog that has no link back to your own site, and you have to hit ‘back’ on your browser to get out? Or the themes with boxes that make you scroll to see the tiny wording. Granted, generally people who use such a theme are rarely worth reading in the first place, but still…
I think xanga took off initially because of all the freedom on the site. But Myspace took off because they successfully ripped off the best of all features at the time and put them on one place.
Facebook took off because it added even more features plus they managed to avoid most of the spam of myspace. So you felt like you were connected to your real friends.
I liked how you could customize your page on Myspace.. but it got really out of hand, messy and unorganized. I’m sure FB put that in mind when making & managing their site. I like how organized Facebook is. Although they should let us customize SOME things.. but I’m also not 100% sure I’d like that.. because those people who were “myspace thugs” will start having pictures of guns and obnoxious music on their facebook pages, slowing things down.. and that’s not cool at all lol
Every site has it’s own security flaws, you can customize if it allows code. CSS isn’t hard to learn.
Even something fairly simple like a choice of colour palates or something would be a good compromise? So you can get a change in colour of the sidebars and such.
@TheTheologiansCafe – I agee
I like some customization, but I also like the standardization of formats that facebook has. I hated myspace because everyone’s profile had flashing lights and loud music and it was hard to read some of them. You had people designing their own profile pages who didn’t have the first clue about design, like the fact that it’s hard to read pink text on a red background (there are a couple of xangas that have a similar problem, but not quite as many).
I think a bit of customization would be nice, like maybe users could change the color scheme or a banner picture or something like that, but not be able to change the overall layout, just for ease of navigation. I use facebook fairly regularly, but I have to admit that I rarely go on people’s profile pages. Mostly I read the news feed and that’s about it. I don’t know if other people do more. I still have a myspace, which I haven’t gone on it for probably over a year, but I had basically the same routine there as well. I scanned through to see if anyone updated, read or commented on interesting things, and then moved on. The only time I look at profiles is when someone requests me as a friend and I go to see who they are. I don’t know if other people are different, though.
How about limited customizing that doesn’t mess things up?
same format but able to choose a different color theme and they cannot change font to dust mite size.__. there are some sites that I’ve seen with tiny tiny font and I can’t read it even when I highlight it. on myspace, sometimes the comment section is too cluttered so maybe be able to customize how many comments are shown like 10 at a time, then there is a next link in however many multiples that they decide to show, instead of 50 long comments.
I would like there to be a little bit of personalization.. Like different colors or something. Not a whole change of layout.
I like being able to play around with the code on my site. Even if I don’t do it well, the aspect of personal freedom is important.
Consider this: if a site doesn’t let you change anything, then you’re limited to what that site does. If the internet modernizes, you can’t move along with it unless the parent company does. You’re stuck part and parcel with the administrators in terms of the features you can provide your readers.I want to be able to go out and find the newest features and abilities, and put them on my blog if I want to, rather than have to wait for some company to get around to it.
I used to be a regular changer of my page on myspace. I’ll admit I liked the freedom, but then even my own taste started to change. That’s the reason I changed it so much. But then, I realized by looking at other profile pages that it is actually tacky and I feel that if I want to represent myself, why not represent myself as who I am. So, to me profile pages should be a little colorful in the layout but not have all those flashy giffs and bloated widgets all over the place. A profile should represent you, but in a simple way. You still want people to know who you are by what you say.