New: Your photo as page theme.

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March 16, 2009 on 8:10 am | 55 Comments

A few months ago, we added a Customize Colors feature to My Yahoo! that allows you to start with one of the built-in themes and make it your own by choosing colors for different parts of your page. We received a lot of great feedback on this feature, including many requests to be able to use your own images. I’m excited to announce that this week we’ve enhanced the feature to let you do just that!

To reflect its broader capabilities, we’ve renamed the feature Customize Theme. You can find it by clicking the Change Appearance button at the top of your My Yahoo! page.

Just click on the background area for either the top of the page (what we call the Page Header) or the background of the main part of the page (what we call the Page Background). In either case, you’ll see that you now have a choice of an image or a color for the background. We’ve set things up so you can either upload an image from your hard drive or pull in an image from your Flickr account, if you have one.

A couple of tips for the page header area:
• An image that isn’t too busy works best.
• The ideal image is about 150 pixels high, so you’ll be able to see most of it (a larger image will be cropped).

Please check out our detailed Tutorial and Online Help on Customizing Colors and Backgrounds to guide you through using this new feature. Please let us know what you think.

–james
My Yahoo! Product Lead

New: Create your own page colors.

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October 20, 2008 on 10:56 am | 32 Comments

By popular request, you can now customize the colors for the header, background, and text on your My Yahoo! page. You can find this new feature under the Change Appearance menu on the upper left hand side of the page. Once there, you will see a link to Customize Colors. You’ll see two visual sections like the ones represented below.

By clicking on different areas of the first section you can highlight four different areas of your page to customize. The four areas include the header, sub-header, page background, and content area. Depending which area you select, you can see associated customize options available for that particular section on the right hand side.

A good tip to keep in mind is to choose background and text colors that have good contrast in relation to each other, so that the content remains legible. The best way to see how it works is to give it a try. It’s pretty intuitive once you start using it. At any time, you can change the color back to the original color you started with by clicking the Reset link that is shown next to the I’m Done button.

You can create 9 custom themes of your own. As you create new custom page colors, you can find your colors added to the list of Custom Themes available when you return to the Change Appearance Menu.

This feature is in beta and we’d love to hear your feedback. Go ahead, make your My Yahoo! page as unique as you are.

John
Product Manager

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