New Tool For Creating Your Own Browser Theme – BlogHash.com

Most people think about SEO, Pay Per Click Marketing, Social Media, display ads and many other strategies for driving traffic to their websites. Sometimes, some of the easiest ways to drive more traffic to our websites is right under our noses. Literally. We use this application every minute we are surfing the web but seldom do we think of it as a marketing tool: The Internet Browser. Whether you use Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, Opera or any other browser, every second you spend surfing the web is time spent looking at your browser. What if you could turn your fans’ browser into a marketing tool to help drive traffic to your site and increase their engagement with your brand? Well, now you can, quickly and easily.

Founded in 2007, Brand Thunder specializes in creating highly interactive browser themes that integrate general web browsing functionality with custom content and tools that make it easy to stay engaged with those who follow your brand. So what does that really mean? A great example of this is a browser theme they created for College Humor:

This theme has a simple design that’s aesthetically pleasing and yet keeps both the College Humor brand and content in front of those using the theme with their browser. Brand Thunder clients like College Humor and The Huffington Post, have consistently seen an average of 8 times more visits to their websites from browser theme users than from regular website visitors. That means on average, a browser theme user with your theme installed will visit your site 8X more than your regular website visitors.

Fortunately for those of you without the design and development capabilities of College Humor, you don’t have to hire a team to make a theme like this for you. You can create one yourself in minutes with BT:Engage, Brand Thunder’s new browser theme tool. Here’s how…

Step One:

Go to http://bt-engage.com and create an account. Then decide what sort of theme you want to create. For this tutorial we’ve chosen this website: Bloghash.com

Step Two:

Click – “Create a new theme”. Then name your theme. Obviously we will call this the “BlogHash” theme.

Step Three:

Select which browser you will be designing for. We will be sticking with Firefox but the steps should be extremely similar if not the same for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Step Four:

Choose a background. Since I’m designing my theme around BlogHash.com, I’m going to use the properties window to make my background black to match the look of their site.

Step Five:

Add your logo. First you’ll want to click on the “My Images” tab in the assets section at the bottom of the page. Next you’ll need to upload the logo you’re using from your computer. We simply went to the BlogHash website, right clicked the logo, saved it, and uploaded the logo. Once your logo image appears in the assets area, click on it and drag it over top of the theme you’re creating. When you release the mouse button the image will be loaded and placed automatically. Adjust image size according to your personal taste, but be sure to click the “lock aspect ratio” check box in your properties window to keep the formatting of the logo while it is scaled.

Step Six:

Make sure to enter your URL along with your logo so that when someone clicks on your logo they are directed right to your homepage. Of course, we’ll enter the link: BlogHash.com

Step Seven:

Choose widgets that encourage the types of engagement you’d like to see from those who will use this theme. Since BlogHash.com has a blog, we’re going to drag the RSS widget up and paste the BlogHash.com RSS link into the properties window. Be sure to click “validate” and then “save.” We also added some links to the social media accounts, the homepage and the “articles” section for quick access to those features.

Step Eight:

Click Finish and install! Once you’ve click the finish button at the top left hand corner, your theme will be built and you’ll be taken to another page where you can download and install your theme for free. You can also share this page with others so they can use your theme as well. Here is what the BlogHash theme ended up looking like using our tool:

Here is the theme download page for the BlogHash browser theme. Download for free.

About the Author:

Mark Subel is the Distribution Director at Brand Thunder (BT). You can follow his team on Twitter @brandthunder or Facebook. The team at BT creates persistent engagement between major brands and their online consumers with extreme makeovers for Internet browsers. Brand Thunder’s new platform, BT:Engage gives everyone the tools to build and share their own browser themes.