After customizing both my Facebook and Google Plus profiles, I’m now wondering what I can to do make my LinkedIn profile a bit more interesting too. Are there themes or wallpapers I can add?
Ah, the great old days of MySpace, with its black backgrounds, dark green letters and flaming animated GIF skulls! I remember it, but not fondly. In fact, I can remember when offering up too many personalization options produced some horrendous Web pages that were completely non-functional. Some of them I’d have to Edit > Select All to even read the text, which might be good tradecraft if you’re in the espionage game, but not so much a good idea for people who want to learn more about you. 🙂
Facebook was the site that moved in the opposite direction from MySpace, normalizing everything to a dull set of aquamarine and white elements. Fortunately there are now some personalization options, and of course Google Plus has a nice, big background photo you can see so that’s good too, but LinkedIn has been the sole holdout, keeping everything very plain vanilla, as we ice cream fans call it. But no more!
As of this week, LinkedIn also now lets you add a big background profile photo, though it still doesn’t support type treatments, color schemes or other thematic elements to make your profile really jump out. Yet!
To start, simply click on “Profile” from the top menu:
It’ll show you your own profile, but there’s a new option in town that’s highlighted too:
In case you can’t read it, the center part says “Make your profile stand out with a custom background”.
Click on that and without much explanation at all, it simply launches a File Open window. Here’s mine, with some of my desktop images shown:
I have a great photo of the Matterhorn — the real one, not the one at Disneyland! — and I’ll select that as my wallpaper.
Since the photo’s dimensions are larger than the display area allocated by LinkedIn, it starts out a bit weirdly as just the deep blue sky:
As suggested, click and drag your mouse to change the relative position of the background image itself.
With a little bit of work, the above changes quite dramatically as the image is repositioned:
That’s all there is to the task. Click on “Save” and it’s done.
Here’s my profile with the new wallpaper and, a handy tip, you can click on the below image to jump to my actual LinekdIn profile page so you can see it in all its full-screen glory!
Now, go have some fun with your own LinkedIn profile background!
and you can find me on LinkedIn if you’re so inclined by clicking here: Dave Taylor on LinkedIn.