How to change your image header

One of the things that I love the most about wordpress is that it’s very flexible. One of the things that I love the least is that some things are a lot easier to change/ modify than others.  One of the harder things to change is the header image.

The header image, is the image that shows up behind the title in your blog. It’s the topmost image on the blog, and is often what most people come to identify as the brand for your site.

Depending on the theme that you were using, changing the header image could be a simple matter of filling in a blank, or it could be something that required heavy coding in the CSS file of the theme in order to modify it.

Well, I don’t know about you, but the more I stay out of the CSS file, the better. Although it’s not perfect, this plugin does offer you a simple solution to creating/ adding header images to your site.

Dynamic Headers

The plugin does require you to copy and paste a short snippet of code into your theme’s file. In my case, it was the theme’s index file that needed the snippet of code, and I put it just under the line that says “< ? php get_header(); ? >.”

After I did that step, my custom image header started showing up in the site that I was working on. It was really quite painless and in my opinion, adding the image made my site friendlier to the reader.  See a sample over at my trail running site.

Flexsqueeze theme issues

I’m using the Flexsqueeze theme on this site, and I must say that I really like it.

I like that I can create squeeze pages  that do not look like, nor do they link to the article/ blog section of this site.

I also like the fact that I can have this entire site as a squeeze page or as a blog site, or both like I just mentioned.  The one thing that I don’t like, is that some plugins don’t work under this theme. The reason the pugins don’t work, is because the theme incoroporates a lot of the functionality that the plugin used to exercise.

Take this error:

flexsqueeze theme cannot redeclare pagenavi

I kept beating my head up against a wall trying to figure out that error message. I was trying to see if there was something in the loop, maybe something in the navigation header or perhaps some weird/ odd setting that I’d somehow missed.  I kept coming up blank, until I approached the problem sideways.

When I came at it sideways, I was able to see that the problem was not with the theme per se, but rather with the wp-navi plugin that I’d installed before I started using this theme.  That plugin was having a conflict with the Flexsqueeze theme and creating the error message in my footer.

All it took to fix the problem, was deactivating the wp-navi plugin. After I did that, the error went away.