Google Dresses Up Their Site With Decorative Themes

Google plans to dress up their website a little with some different type of themes that change with the time of day or other environmental aspects. “The colorful graphics to be unveiled Tuesday represent the latest bit of pizzaz to be served up on Google’s home page as the Mountain View-based company caters to the digerati who want to customize everything from their cell phones to their computers.”

Google’s plain looking site has been a strong feature of their clean look and feel for years and changing a few things here and there often causes a storm of conversations on many discussion boards and SEO blogs. Google is always looking for features that will give searches a little extra, such as stock quotes, local weather and news headlines.

The new “Skins” that Google is putting in place “are designed to make the home page feel even more homey”, said Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search products and user experience. “Google has become the doorway to the Internet for a lot of people, so we want to make (the site) feel more like an online living room,” Mayer said. “We feel we are personalizing things in a very tasteful and useable way.”

“This is a much bigger step for Google because they have always prided themselves on their plain white pages,” said Dan Cohen, who worked on the personalization efforts at both Google and Yahoo before recently becoming chief executive of Pageflakes Ltd., a startup that customizes Web pages.

Reportedly, Google will be using 6 themes that will include landscapes at first and then move into more concepts as the idea propagates to searchers. Themes like a Japanese tea garden, a beach, a city skyline and a bus stop will be first in this group and Google may even accept user-generated themes down the road.

The designs also will contain hidden surprises known as “Easter eggs” that will open up with an opportune click at the right time of the day, Mayer said. She wouldn’t reveal any of the surprises, but indicated they will delight high-tech geeks with a sense of humor.