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Your head hurts.

Your eyes are burning.

You feel a little sick to your stomach.

Yep. That's right. You just spent the last two hours searching for 'free myspace layouts' and you came up with bumpkiss, nada, zilch, zip, nothing. You may even be a little astonished that such a burgeoning scene can be so bereft of a truly valuable contribution. One would think that the arena would be overrun with opportunists trying to take the internet by storm producing whole collections --not just one or two here and there-- but whole collections of quality premade MySpace layouts.

One would think.

Well after engaging in some serious clanging of swords on the front lines of the MySpace layout battlefield for the past year, let me tell you where it's at.

Free MySpace layout makers generally fall into one of three categories:

The Good
Although these are few and far between, a small (and I mean very small) group of web designers will actually put some major effort into producing a collection of attractive and truly original MySpace layouts. The backgrounds are worked up from scratch and they are customized to fit well with MySpace profiles. On top of this, great care is taken to make sure the colors selected for the fonts are properly coordinated with the background image to make the text easy to read (a big problem on MySpace).

The Bad
A much larger group of web designers (and I use this term loosely here) will scour the net and download any and every image they can lay their mouse finger on. They focus heavily on celebrity and product photos (cars, motorcycles, beer, etc) and all of them, of course, are copyright protected. So what this essentially amounts to is theft, plain and simple. These images are then used in conjunction with some boilerplate CSS code which converts them into MySpace backgrounds. In some cases, these layout makers will even use the original web address of the 'found' image in their layout codes. So in effect they are not only stealing the image itself but they are also stealing the bandwidth of the website they found the image on. All of the above takes absolutely no artistic talent whatsoever so touting the finished pieces as 'original' or 'handmade' MySpace layouts is an utter sham.

The Ugly
This group of MySpace layout makers use the same tactics as 'The Bad' but will go one step further and use any and every black hat search engine optimization (SEO) trick in the book in an attempt to 'game' their MySpace resource sites to the top of search engine results pages. And unfortunately, many of them succeed. Search engines like Google and Yahoo still have a ways to go when it comes to weeding out websites that employ unscrupulous methods like keyword stuffing and multiple site networking.

HOPE

On the bright side, search volume for the keywords 'free myspace layouts' is actually declining while searches for other related keywords is on the rise. This means that MySpace users are finally starting to realize that using the word 'free' is a waste of a good search term since 99.9% of MySpace layouts are free anway (assuming you don't count all the time you spent trying to find a good one). MySpacers are now starting to become much more descriptive with the adjectives they tack on to the keywords 'myspace layouts' in an attempt to find something that will truly adorn their profiles with an original, classy or professional look.

Hopefully this trend will continue and eventually make it a lot easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Robert Darrell is the webmaster of ironspider.ca where he provides tutorials covering all aspects of web design. He also provides a fine collection of MySpace layouts which are 100% original (no copyright violations).

You can find his collection of MySpace layouts here: http://www.ironspider.ca/adv/myspace/