Once upon a time in the 1990s, Web design was born.

The Internet had already existed for a while, but it had been mostly confined to labs and universities. The first Web designers were programmers ­- quickly followed by everybody else and their mothers. It was a reckless time of flashing images, blinking text, automated midi files and clunky java animation applets crashing browsers.

Eventually, individuals with graphic design backgrounds restored core design ethics to the Internet. These designers strove to find a delicate balance between beauty and usability. The result? A new school of digital expression that balanced equal measures of restraint along with enormous possibilities.

Pioneering Web artists grappled with adapting fonts that were originally made for print, dealing with the variables in monitor sizes and colors that made their designs look different on every screen and working with various browsers that each displayed the same code differently.

Today, self-publishing has never been easier and prettier. The era of Web 2.0 has ushered in the slick simplicity of sites such as Wikipedia, Flickr and Blogger that allow users with no technical ability to easily carve out their online presence with dignity.

Then came MySpace.

In one fell swoop, Web design was pushed back a decade. With millions of users creating their own pages and grafting on endless doohickies, this social network has become a hotbed of garish graphics, illegible fonts, crazy colors, incessantly blinking gifs, automated musical slideshows and more --- often thrust at the viewer all at once! Deja vu?

Ugly tools are made available to ugly site builders; in fact it is a thriving industry. At blinkyou.com you can find martini glasses or pulsating hearts to rain down your profile page at different speeds. Or, how about a rotating 3-D font that shimmers and explodes? At pimpmyspace.org you can get a cursor in the guise of Tony the Tiger or Raphael, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. An animated flying demon with giant wings anyone?

Finding a pretty MySpace profile is like finding a four-leaf clover, it's hard -- PC World ranked MySpace No.1 in their 25 worst Web sites list. Web personality Ze Frank even held a competition to see who could design the ugliest MySpace profile. Here's the winner: http://www.myspace.com/soybuddha .

The broken images, the flying pig and the flashing lights...it's bad. Really bad. But, if you think about it, it's really, really good, too. People can CHOOSE to put ugly designs up there. Sound the trumpets: This is the freedom of an open Internet and there's room for everyone there. Even the uglies. That's something we should celebrate.

But just because you CAN make an ugly site, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

And following along in the community spirit of the Web, I hereby offer my professional assistance for free.

Here's some advice from a professional Web designer about what not to do when you're making your MySpace page:

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Tone down your background image, texture or color so that it doesn't clash with your content. For example, if you have an orange background image, don't use orange text over it.

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Tiled photographic images can be a disaster and almost always make everything illegible -- like this one: http://www.myspace.com/64825305 .

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Loading up the page with multiple video clips, slideshows and audio clips all at once will only slow down or crash browsers. Limit these high bandwidth items ­- you can always rotate them regularly.

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Take it easy with the free add-ons.

While free is tempting, do you really need animated fairies and butterflies that clutter up your page? Don't forget, there's already going to be an advertisement at the top, which will probably use ghastly graphics. There are tons of ways to be expressive without this stuff. It can be as simple as being creative with your photographs and crops. Make your own graphics by using found images and scanning them into your computer. Take out a pair of scissors and build shapes and collages out of colored paper or magazine scraps.

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Sometimes all it takes is an interesting font to create a really great graphic. Instead of a scrolling ticker, download a cool free font and build a header with your name or a message.

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Learn about html and css technology. If you get really good, you can be like this designer who hacked into MySpace's code to create a very clean design:

http://www.myspace.com/mikeindustries

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Shazna Nessa is asap's interactive editor in New York.

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