Another often asked question. How do I change the logo on my WordPress Blog?
You’ve got the theme you want to use, but want to customize it a little with your own logo/graphic.
- Have your graphic ready, the desired size, as a png, gif, or jpg (others formats may work, but those are the ones I use). My graphic program of choice is Gimp. You can save it as logo.png or whatever you want to name it. Remember the name.
- Upload your graphic to your host. Sounds simple and it is if you know how. First time I tried to upload anything to my first webhost, it was like visiting a foreign country, not knowing where to go, not even knowing enough to know how to ask for directions. Put this where? And it shows up where?
Look for something called a file manager (or if you know how to ftp to your host, simply use that). Your file manager consists of files and folders.
Find the folder which contains your wordpress blog. Then the wp-content folder. Inside this folder you will find other folders and files, look for the theme folder and open it. Here you’ll find the various themes for your blog. If you want to try a new theme, upload it to this theme folder. Open the folder which is your current theme and find the images folder. Upload your new logo image into this folder. - Edit your css so your new image will display on your blog. Not all wordpress themes are identical, you need to change the code so the logo/image in your old header image will be replaced with the new one. In your blog’s admin panel go to Presentation, then theme editor. Look for stylesheet, may say something like editing style.css above the code. Search for your header’s background image. In the header section of your stylesheet look for:
background:url(images/logo.gif) no-repeat
with images/logo.gif being your old image. switch to
background:url(images/newlogo.png) no-repeat
with newlogo.png being whatever name and file format you saved it as.Click Update file.
Of course if you saved it with the same name and format and the original graphic you can just overwrite the image on your host and not need to change the style.css code.
- View blog, if needed ht f5 to refresh your page.
- Celebrate your new found freedom in changing your blog.
Some themes have a built in editor for your header.
Related Links:
New Gimp 2.4 released
How to Make a Custom WordPress Header
My Favorite Graphic Programs