Creating an iGoogle Theme, Part 1

About a week ago, I discovered something that Google does that has made my entire life online so much simpler. The thing is called, "iGoogle." If you don't know what iGoogle is, let me give you a quick overview of it.

When you go too Google.com, what do you see? Not much, probably. Just the Google logo, a search box and two buttons. But up at the top of the page, you'll see the bar that has links to common Google services like Docs and Gmail, a link for you to manage your Google account, etc. Towards the right of this bar, you'll notice a link that says, "iGoogle." Keep in mind you need to have a Google account to use it, but if you have one and you click on iGoogle and fill out a simple form, the entire homepage changes.

You still have the classic Google search box up at the top, but now you also have all these "Gadgets" beneath it. You can add gadgets, change settings, remove them and rearrange them. On my iGoogle page, for example, I have Wikipedia search, weather, a clock and calendar, top news, etc. It's a great way to aggregate all the aspects of your online life. The gadgets are mostly developed by third parties, and there are hundreds if not thousands of them... and it's all free! So now, whenever you go to Google.com, you get your own personal iGoogle page.

But how personal is it, really? Yes, you can add and arrange your own gadgets, but the page still looks like all the other Google pages. Mostly white, with some light blue borders. About as generic as it gets. But fear not, for this is where the creative aspect of things comes in: You can change the look of your iGoogle page using what Google calls, "Themes." If you look to the right of the search box and down slightly, you'll notice two links: "Add Stuff," which is where you search for and add Gadgets, and "Change theme from Classic." Click the latter and you get a nice browser with previews of some of the most popular themes. Choose one, and it applies instantly, adding different images behind the search box and changing the colors of the entire page. Click the, "More options" link and you get a full page theme browser, where you can search, select categories, sort by how many people are using each theme... and there are thousands of themes to choose from.

The themes browser is a very nice way to get creative with your iGoogle page, but we're creative people. We don't want to simply use someone else's theme, we want to create our own! Hence the topic of this two part series, "Creating an iGoogle Theme." In this post I'll be talking about the simple way to do it, but next time I'll be talking about the much more powerful way of doing it.

So here's the easy way to make your own iGoogle theme. Go to the themes browser (the full page one, not the popup you get on iGoogle.) and look over on the right sidebar. There's a big headline that says, "Create your own theme." Click the Try Now button below it, and you're off and running. You're then presented with a very simple interface, with a big preview of your iGoogle page. This preview is covered with a big button that says, "Upload an Image." You can use this to upload an image that will appear at the top of the iGoogle page, behind the search box. You can upload any image you want, but keep in mind that it's best if it's wide and short, not tall and certainly not narrow. You can crop it once you upload it though, so don't get too obsessive.

After you're happy with the way the image looks in the preview, you can move on to the color choices at the bottom. You can choose the color for the text in the header, or the top of the page, and the theme color, which controls the border color of the gadgets. After that simply enter in some info about the theme and the artist (that's you!) and click, "Create Theme." You can them submit the theme to the themes browser so that you, as well as the rest of the world, can use your custom theme.

And you're done! That's a very easy way to create a them, but you have almost no control over anything other than the header photo. You have basic color controls, but you're limited to the Google provided palette and you can only have two different colors. In my next post, we're going to learn about a slightly more complex but infinitely more powerful way of creating themes. Stay tuned!