How to create your own iGoogle theme

Posted on January 24, 2008 at 7:10 am

If you’re a big Google user, you probably use iGoogle as your home page when you open up your browser. iGoogle is the “customized” version of the Google search page that allows you to add additional gadgets to your site, such as a weather gadget, an RSS reader gadget to keep up with your feeds, a news gadget of the latest top stories, etc.

At first, iGoogle did not have any customization options in terms of skins or themes, which kind of sucked. Finally, they came out with themes (only 5 at first) that allow you to at least change the color scheme and the top graphic.

Recently, they also came out with the iGoogle Themes site, whereby users can create their own iGoogle themes and then upload them to the iGoogle theme gallery for others to use.

However, creating your own iGoogle theme is not very simple as you can see from the above link. You need to know some XML and some other advanced stuff to create a good theme manually.

How to create a customized iGoogle Theme

igThemer is a cool web site that you can use to create your own personalized iGoogle theme. It has a ton of design elements that you can change including the following:

Header Background Image

Google Logo colors

Tab Border/Background colors

Gadget Area/Border/Header/Text colors

Menu/Delete Icon images

and lots more! You can also see how the changes will look in the actual theme by clicking the Refresh button after each change. If you want to include your own graphics as the background image as shown above, you’ll need to upload it onto the Internet and then provide the URL to the image.

The best way to do that is to upload an image to Flickr and then just grab the code from there and paste it in. That way you can have your own customized backgrounds also.

Here’s my nasty looking customized iGoogle site that I made in two minutes. Of course you’d probably want to spend a little more time than I did!

When you click Create, you’ll actually get a link to preview the skin at Google. You’ll have to take the link that is provided and set that as your home page. You cannot actually replace your iGoogle homepage with this new theme as it is only in “Test Mode”. If you want to be able to use it without having to go to a funky long URL, you’ll have to submit it to the Google Theme directory and get it approved by them first!

The URL provided still brings you to same Google start page you’re used to, but with the weird URL. If you don’t mind that, it’s a great way to create your own iGoogle theme just the way you want! Enjoy!

[tags]igoogle, igoogle theme, create igoogle theme, edit igoogle theme, customized igoogle theme, personalized igoogle theme[/tags]

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Comments

3 Responses to “How to create your own iGoogle theme”

klein said on : January 24th, 2008 at 10:03 am

IT SURE WOULD BE NICE IF YOU KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT HYPERLINKING PROTOCOLS!!! IT’S A GREAT IDEA TO USE THE IMAGE AS A HYPERLINK TO THE PAGE YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT RATHER THAN JUST OPENING A NEW WINDOW WITH THAT IMAGE IN IT!!!

Bauer-Power Dot Net said on : January 24th, 2008 at 1:56 pm

I love iGoogle, I have been using it for a long time now. Google also gives you an option to make your own completely personal iGoogle page through Google Apps too. You should check that out.

chicka said on : September 15th, 2008 at 2:17 pm

thank for the great advice!this helped me out a lot!
i think that igoogle is the most popular hompage in the entire world so we need to personlize it to make it are own!thanks again for great advice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!