iGoogle Themes, Customize Your Google Homepage

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on iGoogle Themes. Little did I know how popular the post would be; presently ranks first in google for, “igoogle themes” and has received over 1016 unique page views in just over two weeks.

So I’m writing this new post to provide my visitors with some helpul information and resources about iGoogle and iGoogle Themes and of course learn how to customize them for their viewing pleasure .

Introduction to iGoogle

iGoogle, previously known as, Google Homepage, was created to allow Google users the ability to include gadgets on their homepage. Customize iGoogle to display time, date, gmail, favourite quotes, dictionary. Add unique tabs to organize your rss feeds into a seperate page where you can view your collection of your favourite news or stock quotes all on one page.

Introduction to iGoogle Themes

According to Google, all themes will dynamically change to match your time of day, including local sunrise and sunset times. In my case, I live in Calgary, where the weather isn’t exactly what you would call your standard “Winter Spring Summer Fall” type of year because we’ve been known to have blizzards in July (that’s right, I said BLIZZARDS brrrrrr!). I use the Bus Stop theme; your average group of people standing by the bus stop – the people never change, but when it rains their outfits do . All themes are different. One comment I received from Austrailia said, “Unless you live in Australia, where the beach and cityscape scenes show daytime at night and vise versa”.Although Google claims there are no other themes available, I’ve seen a custom Dell iGoogle Theme.

Current iGoogle Themes

Presently, Google offers 6 themes:

• Classic
• Beach
• Bus Stop
• City Scape
• Sweet Dreams
• Tea House
• Seasonal Scape

Custom iGoogle Themes / Skins

Last week, Greg Bullock, posted a link on this site for his iGoogle gadget for creating custom skins (www.bonstio.net/skins/). Although still in Beta, Greg’s iGoogle Skins gadget doesn’t work yet,however it does provide users with instructions on how to create and install your iGoogle theme once the gadget is installed on your iGoogle.

The tool links to sample skins where you can see examples of previously created themes.

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