How to customize your Facebook page for free

Give Facebook a near-complete makeover by using the free Social Fixer add-on for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and other browsers not named Internet Explorer.

Facebook's built-in customization features
There's a boring sameness about Facebook profiles. Pretty much all you can do is add profile and cover photos, change what appears on your timeline, and tweak the contents of your news feed. The Facebook Help Center provides instructions for adding a profile picture and cover photo; adding, hiding, and deleting items on your About page; and customizing the content of your news feed.
There's also information in the Help Center that describes customizing the appearance of a Facebook Page. According to Facebook's Managing a Page section, Pages can be created only by people who are "the official representative of an organization, business, celebrity or band."
Not being an official representative of anything or anyone in particular, I'll have to leave the Facebook Page crafting to someone else, alas.

Give Facebook some personality with Social Fixer
Just because Facebook hasn't placed much emphasis on customization to date doesn't mean we're stuck with the layout and options the company offers. The Social Fixer browser add-on spiffs up your Facebook account with such features as news-feed tabs, feed filters that let you direct specific items to one of your tabs, image previews, and themes.
Social Fixer works with Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and other browsers, but not with Internet Explorer. I tested the Chrome version of the add-on. The first screen of the program's seven-step setup wizard lets you choose the recommended settings or a "minimalist" approach that turns off most of the add-on's features by default.
The option to place application and game posts in separate tabs on your news feed is selected automatically on the setup wizard's second screen. The third lets you customize the chat list by removing the chat sidebar and replacing it with the old pop-up chat list. You can also show all online friends on the chat list (this option is selected by default), or use a compact chat list that does away with thumbnail images.