There have several tutorials on how you could create your own personalized homepage in Twitter ^[1] but this one is different since it takes into consideration a new trend that was started by @waynesutton ^[2] and then also popularized by @problogger ^[3]. The latest I saw today was at @vrreddy ^[4], you can also the same changes now at my profile @keithdsouza ^[5].

The design gives a very personalized touch to your twitter profile and I will describe to you simple steps, how you can achieve this without having to create several images to perfect it. Before I go ahead lets look at the outcome of the design with the screenshot below.

As you can see from the screenshot above I was able to give a personalized touch to the twitter home page using the colors used at Techie Buzz, as well as introducing a extended profile where users can contact me ^[6] using other social networking alternatives.

How to Personalize your Homepage with a Similar Design?

While I tried out several combinations to get the right page background, it was not turning out to be perfect for the twitter home page. After several tries I was able to come up with some exact measurements you will need to use to create a personalized home page like I have (I used screen rulers to come up with the exact combination).

Here are the steps for the design, I used Paint.net but you may use any of your favorite image creators.

The Main Background

Create a blank image that is of 1900px  x 1600px, width and height respectively. I choose this dimension since it will fit most of the display resolutions available, using a smaller sized image would only fill up a part of the screen on larger display.

If you choose to create a image that is only 800px x 600px it would only cover that area in a 1280px x 780px resolution but user a larger one will always fit to width. Of course you can use overlapping (Tile) but our goal is to create a perfect background that would fit all screen resolutions.

The Header

The header you create should be exactly 100px in height since that is the only dimension that will interline it with the rest of the page, anything shorter or longer would give your page a bad look.

The Sidebar

The sidebar can be anything between 200px to 250px wide depending on how much breathing space you want to keep between the tweets and your sidebar profile. The height should measure between 350px and 450px so that it would look good on all resolutions.

Unlike the header you have a bit of flexibility with the sidebar and can play around with it.

Additional Tip: I didn’t have much time to use Paint.net to properly create the sidebar so I used a small trick to do it. Since I wanted to have different fonts and colors for the text, I thought it would be best if I would do it with HTML.

I fired up Windows Live Writer and wrote a post with everything formatted then created a screenshot of it using FSCapture. Once I had resized the image, I then copied it and used it in Paint.net, though the result is not exactly awesome, I will improve on it in coming days.

You can do the same by creating a plain html file through your favorite editor too.

Posting your changes to Twitter

Once you have created and saved the entire image you will have to setup it up as a background image for your twitter profile, just ensure that the image weight is less than 800Kbs since that is the maximum size twitter will allow you to upload.

To change the background image login to your twitter account and go to Settings –> Design.

Select the option to use your custom style and upload the image you just created. That’s it your custom style will be applied in a few seconds.

Summarizing

Though it took me four times to perfect the image sizing (I used the ruler the 4th time), I would love to see you do it the first time itself. Do let me know when you update your twitter home page through your comments or by contacting me ^[6] I would love to see your versions of it.