By Mark O’Neill

One of the best features brought out by Google has been the iGoogle customised homepage and this has led to an outburst of creativity as people vie to see who can come up with the best homepage theme.

If you are new to the iGoogle scene, the first place to check out for themes is the iGoogle page itself. Just go to http://www.google.com/ig and there you will see your own customised page. There should be a link on the right side of the page which will allow you to select an official theme and it should look like this :

Click on “select theme” and this box should come up :

Clicking on one of them and clicking “save” will give you one of the Google themes. But what if you tire of those ones? Well you can try one of the new ones which have not yet been officially announced or you can select one which other iGoogle users have made.

A good place to start is the Google Group for custom iGoogle skins. Wading through all the posts though is a bit of a chore but if you have some spare time, it’s worth reading some of the posts as there is some good information in there, especially if you want to make your own themes.

The second best place for themes is this module which you can add to your iGoogle page. This has a lot of custom themes made by others and is basically an updating skins directory. Quality varies greatly but this is still a great directory to keep an eye on for new entries.

Then of course the next best place to read is our very own previous post on iGoogle themes.

One of the really great things about the iGoogle themes is that if you set your location, then the theme changes as the day progresses. When it is the evening, the theme goes dark. When it becomes daylight again, the theme lights up.

If you are a Firefox and Greasemonkey user, there are lots of scripts out there to change the appearance of your iGoogle page. My favourite is the one to automatically redirect you to your iGoogle page when you type in http://www.google.com . Google doesn’t seem to have a feature in place yet that will allow you to choose a default Google homepage so this Greasemonkey script really comes in handy.

Have you made a iGoogle theme that you would like to share? Or do you know of any websites that offer iGoogle themes? Let us know in the comments!