Changing The Header On Your Wordpress Theme

There are thousands of wordpress themes to choose from out there, I don’t now about you but it took me ages to find one I was happy with. I think the one I am using now is about the 7th I’ve tried! But whichever one you do settle for the chances are the header is not going to suit you or your blog.

You can read about creating a new header and a great piece of free software to do that in my post here.

Once you have got your header you now have to make it work with the theme you have chosen. I had nightmare trying to do this. I searched google and kept reading about making changes to php files. The fact that I didn’t know what a php file was, and I’m still not that sure, didn’t really help.

So after a few hours of frustration I decided there must be an easier way and would try to work it out for myself. I had an idea, tried it, and it worked! After getting back up from falling out of my chair in shock, I tried it in another theme and all good. I’m not sure if this will work will all themes but it’s worth giving a go.

Here’s how I did it:

The first idea I had was to attempt to change the header BEFORE uploading to my server. Once it’s up there, it seems you don’t have much choice but to get stuck into a php file. I have enough trouble with html. So…

Download your chosen theme, unzip it and find the ‘images’ folder.
Find the header image in this folder. Luckily and conveniently for us it is usually called just ‘header’ but it may not and is important you use the same name for your image.
Open the current header image or right click on it and make a note of the image size. We want to make our new header the same size. In all that php code it will have the header name and size, so rather than over complicating things, stick to the same. That way there is less to change.
Create your header or resize one you already have to the same size as the default header. Save it into your wordpress theme images folder by the same name as the existing header. You will be asked if you want to overwrite this, which you do.
Now upload the theme to your domain name and fingers crossed you should be good to go.
When you log in to the admin area of your blog, go to design then themes and preview the new theme. If the old header shows when you preview, don’t panic yet! As I said, I had about seven themes uploaded and when I previewed any of them, none of them showed my new header. As you can imagine I was gutted and assumed it hadn’t worked. It was not until I actually activated the theme that my header appeared. Woo hoo! Success.

Now I’m not positive that is going to work for all themes but it has for the ones I have tried.