Google -- Alternative Color Schemes!

[icon kid]

I suggest that more webmasters take advantage of one, little-known Google freebie called "Google Free,"
which allows you to place a Google search bar on your Web site that delivers the results pages in a color scheme you specify. If your visitors already have the convenience of powering up Google directly from a Google search bar on your page, then why not go an extra mile and have the results pages reflect the color scheme of your site?! -- some visitors may bookmark your search bar just because they like the color scheme it generates. You also have the option to add your company logo in the results pages -- which Google automatically converts into a graphical link to your site.

I've created nine Google search boxes. Each one delivers Google results pages in a different, integrated color scheme -- all except three of them having a very dark background color as the basis for the scheme.

They are:

charcoal
navy
dark green
dark purple
chocolate
dark gray
tan
blue
gray

They can be accessed from the following URL:

http://www.jeffs-icons.com/My_Google_Colors.html

On that page, I've also included some tips on how to set up your own Google color scheme.

Limitations:
* Color-customized results pages are limited to Web searches.
* You must have a Web site in order for Google to deliver color-customized results pages.

[dwig365]

not bad, but can i recomend that you put the scheme on the very first search bar, that way it doesn't look plain at first, and between all of them, theres not much of a difference, make like, gradient backgrounds.

[icon kid]

...i recommend that you put the scheme on the very first search bar...

In order to create any kind of color scheme you need to have at least a few elements to work with, just like you can't make a floral arrangement without a few different types of flowers -- the search page is basically an empty page with just a search bar on it -- the text, links and images at the bottom of each search bar page are not even to be considered as part of the page, that's why they are pushed far down so none of that stuff is seen unless you scroll to the bottom. I did make some changes based on your comments, though.

There are two problems with giving the results pages a gradient background. One is that background images will be tiled if the browser window becomes larger than the image. In order to insure that the image will never be tiled, I'd have to install one that is larger than anyone's browser screen (or using the full screen resolution as a thumbnail estimate)-- that might be 1600 X 1200 pixels. I wouldn't want to go with less than 24-bit color depth for a nice gradient, and that would make the file size too large for a quick download on a dial-up modem. The second problem with having a gradient for the results pages is that it complicates the process of choosing the colors for the seven elements. Instead of choosing colors to be placed over one, continuous background color, I'd be choosing element colors to be placed on a background of several different shades. That means there'll be different amounts of brightness and/or color contrast for elements depending on where they lie on the page. If you haven't seen my "tips" page on how to make a Google color scheme, the URL is below. It has some comments about the use of background images along with screen shots.

http://www.jeffs-icons.com/Customize_Google_Colors.html

...and between all of them there's not much of a difference...

I wasn't sure if you were referring to the search bar page or to the results pages. There was virtually no difference in the search bar pages (until now). As far as the nine color schemes I've made, six of them are very dark, so there's not much of a difference between them in brightness, if that's what you meant.

The changes:
Each search bar page uses a tiled "weave" background pattern -- previously, all nine used the same medium gray color. The same pattern is used in all, but the colors of the patterns now match the background color of the results pages, so, the search bar delivering results in dark blue, uses a dark blue "weave," the bar delivering results in dark green, uses a dark green "weave," etc. I think this is an improvement. Here's the link again (to the nine search boxes):

http://www.jeffs-icons.com/My_Google_Colors.html

There are still a couple of other things I wish I could change. The Google logo on the results pages can be one of three colors, white, gray, or black, but the logo on the search bar page can only be one color, white, as far as I can tell. I want to have the same choice of three colors for this, and it would be good if I could stipulate the colors for the text/background in the text entry field. I'll have to query Google's help staff on this.