A HUGE Facebook theme gallery

Facebook Themes (Facebook Style Gallery) provides access to the list of free themes created by other users. Themes can change the background, text color, and frame color of your Facebook page, but their quality is completely dependent on designer’s skills – and, here’s a spoiler, most are not that good.

Facebook the way you want it…

 If you use Google Chrome, then Facebook Themes will allow you to customize your Facebook experience. Just download and install the plug-in, then visit the Theme Creator site. From there you just have to select a theme and it will decorate your timeline and homepage.

It all works as intended, but the system is flawed. The problem is that the quality of each theme is massively variable, and often just bad. With the “preview” doing very little to demonstrate what the theme will actually offer, you are left guessing the effect any given choice will have on your Facebook page.

… if you are lucky

 Often the background of any given choice appears hidden behind the page’s content, or the theme will turn all the text a garish shade of pink. This isn’t technically a problem, but it makes carefully selecting your choice of theme redundant as luck features heavily in the final appearance.

This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that the Theme Creator site is an organizational nightmare. Searching yields patchy results, with many of the default categories stuffed full of dated, dubiously branded, and poorly put together themes. Add to that the fact you either have to share or create an account to gain access to a theme, and you start to question the value of the service.

Okay app, bad service

 The Facebook Themes plugin itself is good and does exactly what it claims to with ease. Unfortunately, the site you must use to search for themes is so insistent that you sign-up or share just to check if you like a theme, we quickly found ourselves wondering if it was all worth it.