Customize your Google personal page with themes

March 20, 2007

With all the competition out there for personal start pages, you’d think the big G might have done something like this soon. Now you can customize your Google personal page with one of seven themes. They really only change the top header image around the search box. To be honest, I like that. Many other offer uber customizable interfaces, but they show everything down. I use Google’s because it’s quick. I want my homepage to launch fast, and be usable. Since I’m on the net all day, I need it to be very responsive. One of the neat things about Google’s implementation is that many of the themes respond based on your location. For instance, the beach theme will show sunrise in the morning, and sunset in the evening. While not a drastic or particularly slick theme system, it’s still a bit of welcome window dressing to an already powerful personal start page. The ability to provide your own custom code (CSS, images, etc) is really the only thing missing.