Get a good looking blog

Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 9:23 am

Today’s question:

Hi Mike, In setting up my blog, I have so far taken your steps of selecting a niche, adding appropriate plugins, setting ping list etc. Now, I’m trying to set up the aesthetics of the site. My primary concern at the moment is finding a semi-professional looking header, and finding a theme that allows me to easily upload custom headers. Any suggestions?

There are literally thousands of available themes available. The WordPress Theme Viewer probably has the largest selection. One of the things I recommend to my customers when picking a theme is to look at the test site and make sure you are comfortable with the text layout, how they display block quotes, ordered lists etc.

Once you have a theme that you like it is relatively easy to change the header graphic. If you can find one that meets your needs except for the header graphic it is time to test it.

Caveat: There are a lot of choices but not all are coded well. You may have trouble with some themes and it is not unusual for me to try 3 or 4 before finding a quality theme that is coded properly. Can be frustrating especially when it has the exact look you want.

Now if it has passed the test and seems to be stable go into the theme folder and find the header image.

Usual path will be wp-content/themes/yourthemename/img or images. Most times it will be called header.jpg or header.gif.

If it doesn’t have either of these go into the style sheet and scroll down until you see #header in the code and below that there will be the code that pulls the image so you can find what it is called.

Download the image to your computer so you can see what size it is. For example on this blog the header is 860px x 150px.

Create an image the same size and name it the same and overwrite the image on your server and you should be good to go.

That is all it will take to change the image.

Now if you have added your site name and tagline to the image you will need to go to the header.php file in your blog and remove some code that automatically displays your blog name and tag line over the image.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold