I’ve noticed that customising the your blog’s header is one of the best and simplest ways to make your blog unique. I’ve also noticed that folks not too familiar with CSS are are not too sure about the best way to go about it. They find tutorials that sound like what they need, but there might be a simpler solution.
This post is a summary of the best ways to go about header customisations using CSS. By using CSS in a custom file or a child theme, you can isolate the changes you’ve made to the theme. This helps you to keep track of changes and future-proofs your site in case a new version of your theme is released.
The instructions here are specific to the Thesis theme (and the CSS goes in your custom.css file in the custom folder), but the principles can be applied to other themes too. For example, the Copyblogger theme, which I used to use, has some of the same element selectors (IDs and classes), and I’ve also been working with a child theme for Hybrid and used one of the following techniques.
Full-width headers
I’ve already written a tutorial on full-width headers for Thesis. It’s the most complicated technique for modifying the header, because of the need (or want) to separate the nav and header with different colours or backgrounds.
Clickable headers
Rick did a tutorial on the thesis forum a while ago on clickable header images.
This technique is most useful for someone who wants to replace their whole header area, including the title and tagline, with an image, but still make it link to the home page. For example, the header at Anxiety, Panic & Health.
Update 6th March 2009: I was recently made aware of a header section in Sugarrae’s hooks tutorial that might suit some of you for a clickable header as well.
Replacing the title with a logo
If all you want to do is replace the title with a clickable logo rather than the whole header, we can use the same principle as Rick’s tutorial, but it’s even simpler.
In Thesis, the blog title has an ID of logo. To replace the text with an image, such as the one on Simon Preacher.com, use:
.custom #logo a { display:block; height:150px; width:300px; background:url(images/logo.png) center no-repeat; text-indent:-9999px; }
All of that says: show the title link as a block of a certain size (change the dimensions to suit your image), with a background image (change the name and location of your image accordingly), the image is in the centre of the link block and doesn’t repeat, and the text of the links is pushed way off to the left so that we can’t see it any more.
The result is something like:
Creating a header background & keeping the title text
If you have a decorative (and subtle image) to put in your header, but it doesn’t have your site’s title on it, you might want to keep the title link and tagline in your header. To do that, the solution is, again, simpler than the clickable header.
Make the image a background of #header.
.custom #header { height:150px; background:transparent url(images/header.png) center no-repeat; }
You can give the header a height so that your image doesn’t get cut off on the top or bottom. If there’s a predominant colour in your image and your image doesn’t take up the whole width of the header, you can replace transparent with the colour in your image (e.g., #f00 for bright red or #000 for black). Speaking of widths, if you’re not sure how wide your header image should be, check out the Thesis user manual for optimal header image widths.
A great example of using a background image and still using text for the title is The Firke Files:
I reckon that’s about it. Those are the four main ways I’ve seen people trying (and sometimes struggling) to change their headers. Take the path of least resistance!
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This is awesome, thanks. And so is your use of the word “reckon.”
Most excellent. I now can make headers. And Andrew’s post forced me to go back and find ‘reckon’. ; )
I plan to get the Thesis soon and will want to sport a groovy header. These are awesome tuts. Am saving this for future ref. Thx a billion!!!
Missy.
Helpful indeed! One question: Having set up a header background while keeping the title text, as in your last example above, how do I move the text to center it? My title appears flush left. Thanks for any help on this.
Paul
Paul — Good question. I didn’t address any of the extra styling, but hoped people would ask if needed. Try
.custom #header {text-align:center;}.Many thanks! Will give this a go.
Paul
This is great and is working. However, there is an indent that makes my header graphic off-centered at top. How do I lose that extra indent? (http://www.mindylockard.com/blog)
Andrew — glad you liked the post! I guess the use of “reckon” is a bit Australian: good to add a bit of flavour in my writing. ;-)
Kim — hope you weren’t looking too long since it was right at the end!
Missy — there will be more, so make sure you come back when you need to find some Thesis help!
Amy — I can’t really see the problem that you’re talking about, unless it’s off-centre by one pixel, in which case you might need the image to be 959px wide. Did you figure it out already?
kristarella, what about vertical movement? My title and tagline are now centered but my title is at the very top of my header image, while my tagline is at the very bottom. I’d like to bring them into the middle somewhere. Can you tell me if there is a list of the functions I can use to move the text around? Thanks!
Paul — You can give w3 Schools CSS a go for finding the things you need, but I don’t know how helpful it will be because certain attributes apply to all elements on the page, not just text. For what you’re trying to do I would suggest giving the title padding at the top. That could push the tagline down further though. So, you might want to use Firebug to see if there’s any padding or margins you should remove.
Excellent thought, Kristarella. Thanks so much — I’ll play around with the padding idea. And thanks to you, I downloaded Firebug today. Appreciated your pointer to it!
thanks for the tutorial :) I will try it out
btw, where did you get these background images from,I love that one with red and black .. did you design them ? or is it from any other source ? can I use it ?
dinu, I got the textures from BittBox. I placed the images over a black background and set the layer to screen, overlay, dodge or burn, or whatever layer style I liked best.
Thanks a ton…
It is easy…
I’m waiting for your post on footer
Den — I have done one tutorial on footers, but not a round up like this one.
p.s. I would prefer you use something resembling a name when commenting. Thanks! Draws to my attention that my comment policy isn’t linked to near the commenting area, so I won’t edit you name this time.
I always thought of “reckon” as a “Southern” expression. I am in North Carolina, but you can’t get much more southern than you guys. I enjoy your site and tweets. Thanks!
Thanks
Hey, I’m trying to add the click-able logo like your simonpreacher.com/blog example. You can see my site here: http://www.thephoenixrealestateguide.com
The image I am trying to use as my header is here: http://thephoenixrealestategui.....er-pic.jpg
My custom.css code looks like this: .custom #logo a { display:block; height:215px; width:960px; background:url(wp-content/uploads/phoenix-header-pic.jpg) center no-repeat; text-indent:-9999px; }
I tried changing the background:url part to the direct url, but no dice. Any hlp would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Benjamin, sorry, your comment got caught by Akismet because of the links… try the following for the CSS
.custom #logo a { display:block; height:215px; width:960px; background:url(/wp-content/uploads/phoenix-header-pic.jpg) center no-repeat; text-indent:-9999px; }
Awesome how I can struggle for hours and never notice a missing /. Thanks for your help.
Hi Kristarella–This is a great tutorial. I’ll get it in time. Because I don’t understand the css structure or what elements Thesis provides internal, I have been struggling to add additional text or text box to my header and position it, while still maintaining the logo and tagline.
I’m sure I could extrapolate from what you’ve done here if I wasn’t such a noob. Could you help me figure out how to add a new class for some text I want to position close to the bottom right of the header?? I’ve wasted a lot of time on it and am getting nowhere except frutstrated. Sorry for my ignorance, but glad you are a resource for me to educate myself over time.
Well, I was able to ad a whole new section definition and use the sidebar class like you do in your footer tutorial, in order to keep continuity with the look of the site. It’s may not be the best, but I’ve managed to get a welcome block of text inside my header, as I wanted. My test folder is at http://www.ichallengeme.com/Testblog.
Jenna — to add new stuff to the header you need to use a hook. The only thing CSS will have to do with it is positioning.
In custom_functions.php
function header_stuff() { echo '<p id="in_header">This is some extra text for the header</p>'; } add_action('thesis_hook_after_title','header_stuff');In custom.css
.custom #header {position:relative;} .custom #header #in_header {width:200px; position:absolute; bottom:0; right:0;}(Didn’t see your most recent comment before posting this, but hopefully this CSS will be useful anyway.)
Hello!
This is awesome! Love this! But question. I am playing around with putting a pic in my header, but then depending on the pic I need to change the color of the font of my title (White font might work better on a blue header background than black). How do I do this? Thanks! :)
brenda
Also, how do I vertically center or move down my title?
Hi Kristarella–How do I get the RSS feed exactly like The Firke Flies on the bottom right using a custom header image?
My CSS code is:
.custom #header {
height:110px;
background: url(images/header.png) no-repeat;
border-bottom: 2px solid #333;
width: 890px;
position: relative;
left: -20px;
}
Thanks
Susan — it looks like The Firke Files is actually using the normal RSS tab in the nav bar, without the border styling that is around the other nav tabs. So, you would just need to select the option to show the subscribe link in the nav.
Alternatively, if your nav isn’t in the same place you could use something like the following in custom_functions.php,
function rss_link() { echo '<p class="rss"><a href="' . thesis_feed_url() . '">Subscribe</a></p>'; } add_action('thesis_hook_after_title','rss_link');The main bit of CSS you’d need to go with that is
.custom #header p.rss {position:absolute; right:0; bottom:0;}, but you may need more to add the rss icon and tweak it all to your liking.Thanks for the code! It’s always exciting to see the results.
The subscribe is in the right place now (bottom left of header). Where do I find the code to customize the “subscribe” font and add the icon (the subscribe and icon are already on my site, they are just in the wrong place, so I want to customize the new Subscribe to look the same)
Brenda — sorry for the delayed response, not sure how your questions fell through the cracks. In case you or anyone else are still wondering:
Change title colour with
.custom #header #logo a {color:#f00;}Vertically positioning stuff is a matter of trial and error as CSS doesn’t quite calculate it the same way as horizontal dimensions. Use
.custom #header #logo {margin-top:2em;}and play with the number until it looks right.Kristarella,
I have my Home page graphic in place, but it shows on each subsequent page (About, Contact, etc.). What I am asking is how can I change out the header graphic for each page?
Thank you!
John — you can use the classes assigned to the body of each page (if each page you want to change has a body class). For example, the About page would use
.about #header {relevant styles}instead of.custom #header {relevant styles}. You can right click on your page and view the source code to see what the unique class for the current page is.If there are pages that don’t have a unique class assigned to the body you can use a function to filter the body class, in conjunction with conditional tags to assign relevant classes to the pages you want to add a different header to.
Or you can use a non-CSS method with conditional tags to add different images to page headers.
You have to forgive me Kristarella, I am a total newbie to all of this, especially PHP. Is there a step-by-step process you can send me for doing this? I’ve been beating my brain trying to figure this all out, and have tried several methods that have failed, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
John
Hey John, you inspired me to write a post about it. Hope it’s helpful.
http://www.kristarella.com/200.....in-thesis/
I’m building a blogsite for my wife – I’m not a techkie (not even close – I haven’t even heard of “css” until a couple of weeks ago), but I’m a quick learner… Anyway, I used the code below to build a custom banner using Thesis. When I look at the site using Firefox it looks ok; using Opera it looks bad; and using IE8 it doesn’t even show. What did I do wrong? Thank you very much.
Added the following code to custom.css:
.custom #header { border-bottom:none;height:200px;padding-top:0;padding-bottom:0;background:url(http://www.howyouarematters.com/wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/images/banner1.jpg)center left no-repeat; }
Ignacio — try putting a space between the url and the position, i.e.,
banner1.jpg) center.It worked!!!
Many, many, many thanks.
Ignacio
Hey, can the css in layoutstyle.css be changed using the custom style sheet, or only style.css?
(I’m talking about the thesis theme)
Thanks,
John
John — Yes, custom.css overrides both styles.css and layout.css.
Hi Kristarella…
I have a test site with a full width and nav bar with image –
I set this up awhile ago – and used info from you — It looks great in 1280×1024
but a horror in 1024×768 ?? It has a scroll – which I don’t want … and when you
do scroll – the header and nav bar are off ??
Site is here: http://elwalsh.com/special
Any ideas how to fix this?
Thanks for all your tutorials – Very Helpful!!
Ellie
Ellie — It’s not the header that is causing the scroll at 1024 wide, the whole site content adds up to more than 1024 (sidebars are huge): when putting widths in the Design Options you need to consider that there is also padding around those widths. 600px for content and 300px for sidebars is a good starting point if you want to fit within 1024px. Then you can experiment and see how wide you can get without exceeding 1024.
Ahhhh Kristarella You are Perfect!! I changed dimensions and everything is AOK!! I had some images I didn’t want to redesign – so there is a tiny scroll at 1024 but it really is irrelevant… I changed to body –
550 – sidebar 1 – 180 – sidebar 2 – 165 and everything is good now.. Big, Big Thanks to You!! I need to direct the dyi forum to this post!!
Hi,
I’ve received a lot of help from your tutorials. I have constructed a clickable header as an image map. This apparently doesn’t sit well with IE. Ive been in the forums looking for help, but to no avail. Do yo uhave any tips on fixing this or how to construct a header with multiple clickable images that isn’t an image map?
Thanks again for all your great advice and willingness to share.
Adam — Do you have a live example I can view? If I can’t see the HTML/CSS involved I can’t say why IE would be disliking it or what would be a better solution.
Sorry. I forgot to include that.
http://www.woodworkersjourney.com
Also do you need copies of CSS and PHP?
Adam — Ah ok, I looked at that site from your comment author info, but didn’t realise that was the header you were talking about. I’m afraid I have no idea what is wrong. It might help to apply z-indexes to the elements to make sure they stack the right way and I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have no content at all inside the links. However, changing those things didn’t have any effect when I tried it locally, but still something to play with I think.
Yeah, I’ve stumped others with this. Forgive my ignorance I’m fairly new to coding, but what does it mean to have no content at all inside the links?
This little glitch has delayed the site launch for a while and I think the best thing to do right now is to drop the RSS/email image down into a sidebar widget and call it good.
BTW, do you have any info on creating headers with multiple clickable images without using an image map in case I do this again?
I can’t thank you enough for all your wonderful help!
Adam — To have no content in the links means that you have something that looks like
<a href="http://www.example.com"></a>whereas a link should normally contain text or an image<a href="http://www.example.com">Check me out!</a>.You could change from an image map to links containing images and see if it works. You would only need to cut up the header image and put it inside the links you already have there. If that doesn’t work there is something else rather wrong with IE and it’s probably worth finding.
p.s. Where did you get instructions for making an image map with an unordered list?
Well, I got it from Thesis Hacker. (here’s the link: http://www.thesishacker.com/ho.....ap-header)
So, what does it do to have a link contain text as in your example? Check me out!.
And are there tutorials for changing the image map to links containing images?
Adam — Ok. I was just curious about the image map tutorial because I’ve never read a tutorial on it, but using an unordered list wouldn’t be my first choice of elements to use. No reason that I can see that you shouldn’t use a list though.
Generally an element (that is a div, or link, or list or list item etc) that doesn’t contain anything will, by default, have no size. So, it might not be enough to give it a width & height, you might also have to set
display:block;on it, or something like that, to get it to display properly in some browsers. However, if the page were rendered without CSS for any reason (or read by a search engine robot), the element would then become meaningless because you can’t see the image that was supposed to be there and the element would have no size.I don’t know that there are any tutorials for creating linked images. It is fairly simple XHTML. You can see a whole list of the XHTML element tags on the w3 Schools website, which is quite good for tutorials too. The one you want is the
<img>tag. You would put it inside the links you already have and the CSS would almost be the same regarding positioning within the header.Did you ask the author of the tutorial if he had experienced a similar problem with IE? It seems like it would be useful to know if he even tested it in IE, lots of tutorial authors don’t.
Interestingly enough I check the author’s site in IE and his image map is broken!! Should hve done that in the first place!
Thanks so much for all of your help and info. I will rework things this weekend and see if that gets me where I need to be. You’re the best!!
I’m using your cappucino skin (thank you very much)…I want to put a tiny bit of line space between the Blog Title and the tagline because my tagline is long and it bumps right up against the blog title… I want to move the tagline down just a tad). How would I do that?
I’ve tried using
.custom #tagline
to set a margin or padding or border…with no impact what so ever.
Can you please tell me how to do that?
Thank you.
Ginger Mudd — There is a line in the custom.css file that says
.custom #header #tagline {text-align:right; position:absolute; bottom:1em; right:0;}If you changebottom:1em;tobottom:0.5em;orbottom:0.25em;it should be ok.hello Kristarella … thanks for wonderful tips it helped me so much , I have a small problem may be you can help me I can’t change the color of the logo ( title ) on the header i used .custom #header #logo a {color:#f00;} what you mentioned before but it do nothing :( ,.
Martin — If you’re using Thesis 1.6, the best thing is to change the Header colour in the Design Options.
I can’t see that line of code in your custom.css though, I only see
.custom #header #logo {!important; color: #E9AB17; margin-top:1em;}(that!important; is not doing anything, just so you know). If you change it to.custom #header #logo a {color: #E9AB17; margin-top:1em;}it should work.hello there! i can see youre good at this.. and i am your opposite… can i please ask for some help? my blogsite’s design(?) got messed up… the header and sidebar are now found at the bottom of the page… i was trying to paste a google adsense code then i deleted it then it looked that way…..
i was also trying to transfer the left sidebar to right for those people with no widescreen i wonder how?
please help? i would so appreciate this/…. thank you………
niceyfemme — If it’s related to the link you left when making a comment: those things look fine to me now. If it’s Thesis related, the best thing is to ask the forum at DIYthemes.
Thanks a ton… It is easy… you were a great help. Thanks again.
Hi Kristarella, I’ve looked at your site before, and you were one of the contributing factors with my decision to go with Thesis. In any case, if you look at my site (www.ndisb.com), you will see what looks like a clickable header image. While I have succeeded in removing the link on the entire image to my home page, I am at a loss as to where to put the code for my image map. I have already mapped the image, I just don’t know where to put the code. Thanks for your help.
Ernie — The HTML for the image map should go in custom_functions.php. Have a look at the DIYthemes article on hooks and also this other good hooks guide for how to wrap the HTML in a function and insert it in the header.
Since I don’t work with code often, I had to play with things a bit, but thanks to you, I was able to get my image map working on my site. Thanks!
Hi Kristarella,
Thank you so much for your great tutorials and your follow up comments. Eons ago, I knew HTML inside out and backwards, but got out of webpage design just as CSS was making a splash. I’m trying to add a photo to the right side of my header.
I used the code you provided from the Firke entry. Specifically
.custom #header {text-align:left; height:155px; background:transparent url(images/header.png) right right no-repeat; }
The header expands to make room for the image, but the image does not show, in any browser (FF, Chrome for Mac or Safari).
Given my history with past programming, I’m sure I’ve missed at bracket or a ;. but I’ll be darned if I can find it.
The site is thisnhlife.com
Thanks for any input.
Lee
Lee — Looks like you have it fixed?
Yes, thanks sorry it took so long to get back. It was a rookie coding mistake (relative path when the photo was in a different folder DUH!). Thanks! Great site. Now I’m going in search of your footer tutorial.
I’ve been looking at Thesis for awhile and I think I’m set. With your explanation, I like my options, but the flash header I have is doing to be interesting to try to integrate into Thesis properly. Things that make you go hm..
Good write up though, always like people that describe neat ways to do things. Keep up the good work!
Justin — These headers are all CSS only methods, but you should be able to integrate your flash header very simply by using custom_functions.php instead of CSS.
function my_custom_header() { ?> FLASH EMBED HERE <?php } remove_action('thesis_hook_header','thesis_default_header'); add_action('thesis_hook_header','my_custom_header');Very cool. I figured it would be a custom hook, but didn’t think it’d be that easy. Thanks!
Thank you! I’ll have been browsing and surfing for hours, trying different things to get my swf header up, but been unsuccessful until now :D
Your tiny little piece of code for a custom function just worked! Ok, I’ll admit I am still trying to get my swf to line up in a sensible way, any hint on that ? At present it is showing a bit under! my navbar and aligning (even though it is the full width of my page (using full width framwork)) to much to the right.
Peter — Without seeing the problem I have no idea what might be causing misalignment, possibly padding in the header.
Yeah, I understand, sorry but I cannot post a link to my dev site. But after fiddeling around at random with the swf size settings (in both the html embed code and the custom css I got it to work!) I’ve got to retrace my steps at some point to understand what I did :) Right now, I have no clue as to which setting did what, they seem to override each other in strange ways.