Google’s Personalised Homepage Themes - Not So Personal In The UK

Posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Last week, Google announced themes for their personalised homepage. I love using the personal homepage and thought this was an innovative and endearing idea, even though it is quite a move from Google’s standard stark white background. My one problem was that I couldn’t use it to start with.

What Themes?

A lot of places mentioned the new themes, with special mention to Tony Ruscoe for finding some of the Easter Eggs already, but, as the image below shows, there was no indication how to add a theme to the page.

Google Personalised Homepage

I returned to Tech Buzz, where I originally read the story, read it all again, clicked on the link to Google and found the select theme link instantly.

The select theme link appeared.

The Difference?

My bookmarks were previously set to http://www.google.co.uk/ig, but clicking on the link from the Tech Buzz article took me to http://www.google.com/ig. It seems that google.co.uk doesn’t allow themes yet, but google.com does. It doesn’t make much difference, all I have to do is change my bookmarks, but it does mean that I lose the ability to search sites from just the UK from my homepage. Still, if you use google.co.uk, but want to see their new themes you will have to do this for now.

The Only Difference?

Apart from themes, I have also found that the Google Calendar widget works much better on google.com, highlighting days with events on and displaying your agenda as well as allowing you to add events, seemingly the only feature on the google.co.uk incarnation. If you use google.co.uk have you noticed these or any other differences? Is the better functionality of google.com enough to get you to change your bookmark/homepage?

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Comments

  1. 1March 26th, 2007 at 1:32 pm

    Ruut Says:

    I use Internet Explorer 6.0 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3. In FF I can choose a theme and everything works fine. However in IE there is no button to add a theme.


  2. 2March 26th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    Amity Says:

    Firefox 1.0.5.10 doesn’t show an option to select a theme from google.co.uk/ig for me. Like the original poster, I have to switch to .com before it shows up. I’m guessing it has something to do with their using ZIP codes to adjust the weather and time - presumably they haven’t implemented UK postcodes yet.


  3. 3March 26th, 2007 at 9:55 pm

    Phil Says:

    Ruut: Make sure you are visiting google.com/ig with IE 6. I’ve not found any problems with it, in fact I discovered these themes whilst at work, where I can only use IE 6.

    Amity: I guess they are having some issue with location, but I put London as mine and it is close. It means I get two sunsets a day when using the beach theme though!

    Thanks to both of you for stopping and commenting!


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