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Customize Themes

Style for Personal Expression

You don't need to settle for one of the 'canned' Themes included with Google Sites.

Theme settings can be customized allowing you to refine them to convey the style you desire.

Many parameters are accessible for your customization from base fonts, background and font colors, header and background images, heading font side and colors, and MANY more.

This is Google Site's alternative to providing you the ability to prepare CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

How it works

To Customize go to:  More actions -> Manage site -> Themes, Colors and Fonts
  • There's a drop down of 'Base theme' options
  • Customization is available via the next items.  A three tier set of settings (6 main tabs, each with 2-7 sub-tabs, and each sub tab has 1-5 individual items to set.  Each item can be set as either: a) Theme defaults, b) none, or c) custom value that you must select.
When performing customization, it's best to start by considering and selecting a preferred 'Base theme' and then make customizations. However you can change back and forth between underlying Themes without losing your customizations.

Customizing a Theme can be a tedious process.  
  • First figuring out exactly what some of the field actually do, and them recalling what settings you've actually customized. 
  • It's helpful to have a test webpage that includes all the relevant elements (headings, gadgets, text boxes, menus) in one place to easily review the impact of your customizations.
  • It's also a good idea to have a pad of paper handy. 

Comments

  • Google doesn't provide you access to every style option.  There may be attributes in a theme that you may want to change buy don't have access to alter them (such as shading of heading lines and links, and spacing related to Headings).  So arriving at the ideal style for your site, is a balance, selecting the right base Theme and customizing suitably.
  • You can't save your own Theme.  Once you've developed the right style for you, it might seem like a good idea to be able to save all the settings in a named theme (like creating a page template), however that can't be done.
    • There are only 2 ways to impart the same settings onto another site:
      • Copy your site (either by publishing it as a Site Template), or doing a 'Copy this site'.
      • Write down all your settings and manually apply them to the other site.

Related Items

There are some configurable items in Edit SIte Layout that impact the look and feel of the site.
  • Header Logo, and Header settings, Site width, and Sidebar settings
  • Learn more at on the Edit Site Layout page.

Special Topics

Custom Banner Image - this can be a fairly desirable item.
TBD flesh this out.  Load as what image (page wrapper vs Header or page).  Including a Logo or not.  Repeating image?  How tall to make image oa need to coordinate with Header height setting.