For those of us who spend a lot of time in front of the computer, a fair percentage of that time may be spent online. Google is the most well-known search engine, to the point where the word has become a verb. You know you’ve “made it” online when people are using your brandname, or a variation of it, as a verb.

“Just Google it”, “I’ll Facebook you”, “Skype me that link” and so the list goes on. I’m gradually uncovering the wonders of Google and all it offers. But the first thing I discovered was iGoogle. 

A customisable homepage?

With iGoogle, you can create your own home page with a Google search bar at the top. Below this you can add any number of widgets from the iGoogle list - there are loads of these, including local news, international news, weather for any number of countries you’d like to add, the date and time of your current location, a dictionary widget, Wikipedia and so the list goes on.

All of these things are then immediately accessible from your home page and you don’t have to go to the url in order to get your information or create your search. 

Here are some things you can do with gadgets

• View your latest Gmail messages
• Read headlines from Google News and other top news sources
• Check out weather forecasts, stock quotes, and movie showtimes
• Store bookmarks for quick access to your favorite sites from any computer
• Design your own gadget

If you already have a Gmail account, you can sign into iGoogle using these log in details and customise it from there. This way, every time you sign in, you will come back to your customised iGoogle page. If not, never fear - as long as you use the same browser, entering in the web address will take you back to your customised page as well.

Your page should look something like this:

You’ll see that there is a little wizard here that will guide you through the set up - easy as can be!

Select some interests and choose a back ground if you like any of the ones that they offer on the wizard. You can choose a new theme once you’re all set up from a much bigger variety. Choose your location and you’re practically ready to go! Select the “see your page button”.

A page will be generated with various boxes that include some of the interests you’ve selected and using the theme you’ve selected. This is a very basic start up but it’s a good point to go from. The Facebook, Twitter and YouTube widgets are more than likely a standard result of choosing the “Social”.

You can log in to each of these using your log in details if you would like to have their feeds run on your home page. 

At this point, my page looks like this:

There is quite a long way to scroll, with even just these few widgets that have been generated, but you may have noticed that there is open space on the right hand side of the page. You can arrange the widgets to fit anywhere you’d like them to go. The bottom of my page currently looks like this:

All you need to do to move a box is to place your cursor over over the top section of the box and you will see a 4 directional “move” arrow. Select the box with this tool and you can drag it anywhere on your page, even shifting other boxes out of the way. You will see a dotted outline of the box where it is going to be placed before you actually place it, giving you an idea of where everything fits in.

After re-arranging the boxes, utilising the empty space on the right hand side, my page looks like this and has very little to scroll down to as it almost all fits in.

If you would like to remove or edit a widget, you can select the little arrow on the top right corner of the box and select delete or edit settings.

In the settings are options such as showing 3 headlines, or 5 headlines in a news box:

(For some reason Chrome isn’t letting me edit any of the boxes, but Firefox is working fine - might just be a glitch that I’m certain they will fix).

 Another option in this drop-down box is “You might also like”. Selecting this will take you to a page of widgets that Google deems to be similar to the one you had selected.

This is quite a nice tool to find other widgets to add to your home page. You will also notice that all of your current widgets run along the left hand side of the screen in a list.

If you select on of these here, it will open the widget in the full space of the window, giving a lot more detail than just the main headlines or temperatures.

At this point you may also want to change the background that runs behind the Google search bar at the top. Again, there are a huge number of pre-designed options for you to choose from. On the right hand side, just under the search bar, there will be an option for you to “Change theme”.

Once you have selected “Change theme from...”, your screen will look something like this:

Once you decide which them you like best, which could take ages, just select “add it now” and it will be added to your homepage. You can see what it will look like without closing the themes options box and if you decide you don’t like it then you can carry on and look for one that you may prefer. While some of the backgrounds themselves may look cool,  they might come with a difficult-to-look-at background colour.

Each to their own of course, but this is an example for me:

The purple is just a bit much in spite of the fact that I quite like the design at the top.

I have iGoogle set as my homepage so I have a certain set of widgets that I like to see whenever I open the Internet and to be honest I tend not to fiddle too much with my set. There are however always new widgets, they’re all free and easy to add and customise so play around and find what works for you.