Designing Your Own iGoogle Theme

Now you can personalize your iGoogle homepage by designing your own theme! The Themes API lets you create custom designs for iGoogle.

You can write a theme XML file using any text editor, such as Wordpad.

To test a theme, you must host the XML file and theme images on a public server. For example, you could host your theme XML and image files through the Google Gadgets Editor, or through Google Code, as described here. Once your theme resources are hosted, you can test the theme by adding ?skin=<theme-url> at the end of the iGoogle URL. For example, you can test the simple example shown above as follows:

http://www.google.com/ig?skin=http://gadget-doc-examples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/themes/theme_simple.xml

An iGoogle Theme consists of a header and footer image, and styles that you define in an XML template for different parts of the page. There are three steps to creating a theme:

1. Creating the visual designs
   
2. Filling out the theme template
   
3. Submitting your theme to the iGoogle directory
   

These steps are described in more detail below.

Before you begin creating a theme, please review our program policy. These guidelines include:

• No trademarks, logos, or signatures outside of the designated attribution area.
  
• All iGoogle logos, links, and text on the page must remain visible and fully usable.
  
• You cannot change, remove, or disparage the iGoogle logo.
  
• We reserve the right for what themes are approved for users and added to the directory.
  

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