Why Create Your Own Custom Twitter Background?
Using a customized Twitter background allows you to include much more information than you are normally allowed to enter in your bio box, such as information about yourself, company, products, and brands; a larger profile picture of yourself, a company and or brand logo; tag lines (slogans), addresses of other websites that you may have; detailed contact info (address, phone, fax), as well as addresses to other social media profiles – Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, MySpace, Skype, YouTube, Flickr, and Blogs.
A unique, professionally-looking Twitter background will demonstrate professionalism, increase credibility, and will help you stand out from the crowd. You’ll stand a better chance to grab attention and make a memorable first impression.
Of course don’t go overboard. Don’t crowd the space with too much information. Choose what you feel is important, will convey more about you, interest potential followers, and create a good first impression.
How to Create A Custom Background: Image Dimensions
When creating the background image, it is important to consider the image dimensions. An image that is not properly sized can be covered up by your Twitter profile or can start to tile, which often leads to an undesired effect.
To cover the entire window, the image dimensions should be at least 1600px wide by 1200px tall. This will work with almost all screen resolutions. (Resolutions that are most often used are: 1024 x 764 and 1280 x 800).
If you want to add a left-hand column, it should be narrow enough not to be covered up by the central Twitter content – under 200px.
Note: You can also choose a smaller image and tile it over your background.
How to Change The Background Image
This one is easy.
Go to Settings (1), then Design (2), and click on “Change background image” (3).
You’ll be able browse your computer and add any image you’d like, so long as it’s under 800k in size, GIF, JPG, or PNG.
Leave the “tile background” unchecked, unless you want to tile your image.
You may want to change the settings of the other colors on your twitter page.
Click on “Save Changes.”
View your new page, and see if you need to make any adjustments.
Creating your custom background image requires some patience and trial-and-error. If you’re not a designer, here are some tools that can help.
7 helpful Twitter Background Resources
Not only do many of these tools provide pre-designed backgrounds, but many can also automatically update your background, provide detailed information and FAQs, and even fully-functional image editors. Here are a few of the best:
1. MyTweetSpace: MyTweetSpace is one of the simplest ways to create a Twitter background with minimal effort. It allows users to create badges, add graphics, play with text, and more to create elegant backgrounds and left-hand text columns. You can even log in with Twitter and MyTweetSpace will automatically update your background.
2. TwitterBacks: This website provides a set of templates perfect for creating your ideal Twitter background. The templates come in PSD (Photoshop) form. In fact, my Twitter account utilizes a TwitterBack template as the basis for my design. Can you guess which one?
3. TweetStyle: TweetStyle offers free background templates, custom Twitter backgrounds, and a few useful blog posts on the subject of the backdrop.
4. Free Twitter Designer: This handy little app provides an easy-to-use image editor to help you create a professional-looking theme.
5. TwitBacks(
): This is another tool for creating backgrounds. This one specializes in left-hand column-based backgrounds.
6. TwitterGallery: TwitterGallery is a directory of themes based on color and category. You can even click the “install” button under any theme, log into Twitter, and poof!…your background is ready.
7. Peekr(
http://mashable.com/2009/05/23/twitter-backgrounds/
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