Twitter has become one of the most popular social networking sites around and is used by many to promote their business. It allows people to connect with people in a more personal way all by spreading information 140 characters at a time. Twitter also allows you to give your own page a customized appearance so that you can streamline it with the colors and appearance of your brand and website.
Learning what Twitter allows you to customize
The main ways that Twitter allows you to customize the appearance of your page includes the background image, your photo, colors of the right sidebar, colors of the text, and some personal information it displays such as your name, website address, and short bio. You can control most of the look of your Twitter page. Twitter only keeps their logo on the top along with the main content area of the page remaining as a white background. With other social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, allowing more extensive customization, this white area where your Twitter posts appear might be allowed to be customized at a time down the road.
Customizing the background image
People like to have a custom background image or photo set as their desktop background wallpaper of their computer. It looks a whole lot better than a lot of the default wallpapers or just having a blank, plain color. Like your desktop wallpaper of your computer, you can customize the background of your Twitter page but there are some rules that you must follow to maximize the impact and visibility of it.
The Twitter capsule, the main area that has all the content spanning from the left top Twitter logo to the right side of the top navigation, spans about 765 pixels wide and goes as long as the content on the page. This capsule is always automatically center aligned on the page. Being 765 pixels wide allows it to still show the background color or background image at the small 800 by 600 resolution. Your background image is always set up so that it is aligned with the top left corner of your internet browser. Most people are not using 800 by 600 screen resolution but when they do, they will not really see what the custom background image of your Twitter page is. 1024 by 768 will still cut off a lot of the background image but will still see a little of it.
It is becoming a lot more common for people to use larger and larger monitors and larger screen resolutions these days. Custom background images need to be designed to to be visible by people using 1280 by 1024 screen resolutions, and higher. Taking that into account, with the Twitter capsule always being centered on the page and your background image always aligned to the left, the main area you should customize is the far left side of your background image. If you are designing this to be most visible on all resolution sizes at and above 1280 by 1024, you should not make whatever you want to be seen any wider than about 200 pixels. Since the Twitter capsule rests about 65 pixels lower than the top of the page, to accommodate the navigation and the Twitter logo, you should also take this sizing into account when you design your background image by possibly having everything lower than 65 pixels from the top of the page.
If you have a website, it is a good idea to customize this background image to carry over some of the look and colors it has. Adding your logo to the top of this 200 pixel wide (and indented downward 65 pixels) area with your contact information and maybe a brief message about you or your company is a common thing to do and a great way to promote and personalize/brand this background image. With that left area having the main content that you want to be most visible, get creative with the rest of the image that extends to the right of there. If you have a certain color to the background of your website, use this as your main background color applied to this image.
Some people have screen resolutions going up to 2560 by 1600 pixels but this is not as common. To accommodate such wide resolutions, I do not suggest making your background image to this size. If you just have your information on the left and then a solid background color, just make your background image that size. In your settings, you can set the color that appears behind your custom background image…but we will get to that part soon. Try to crop your image as needed.
Once you have your custom background image set, you will want to customize the rest of your Twitter page to match. While you are still in the Design tab (still under Settings), you will see to the right of where you clicked to change your background image, “Change design colors.” By clicking on that, you will see five boxes appear with color swatches inside of them. Each of these are labeled for what color they are for. You can use this to match the colors you use on your website for the text as well as the overall background color used in your background image. For those who do not know how to match these colors, you can use their color sliders to try to match them by eye or you can contact your web developer to obtain these colors. Those exact custom colors (HEX color values) will be entered into the box that you see having six letters and numbers (sometimes just all numbers).
Having a good picture can help identify you easily for this is what people will see most as they follow you and you make Twitter posts. Under Settings you will click on the Picture tab (to the left of the Design tab). Your photo can be a photo of yourself, if you are promoting yourself, or if you are a business I urge you to use your logo. Twitter resized the thumbnail sizes of this image (always square) and the full size of this image. I suggest that you upload a larger version that is square, so that you can control exactly how it will look at all visible sizes. Since this will be displayed mostly as a small thumbnail, try to not have small text on the image or fine detail. If you are using your logo and your logo is very complex, try to either simplify it or use an identifiable part of your logo that you can leave larger with the rest cropped off.
Miva