Today I’m going to walk you through creating a WordPress blog and adding a custom header. WordPress is my very favorite blogging system. I’m using a custom header I made using Melissa Esplin’s Family Tree blog kit.
I’ve been doing professional sites for over 12 years, but I only got into setting up blogs a couple of years ago. When I do professional sites, I install the open source blogging software and on my own servers. I like it that way because I have a lot more control over the end product. I have my own ideas of how a blog should look/act, and I do fancy fun things to these blogs.
Your average blog can be done nicely on WordPress’s servers. It’s a great place to do a personal blog.
First, I go to wordpress.com and sign up for an account.
I have to fill in the standard information to get my account.
Then I fill out the information I need to make my blog.
There! My blog is started. Next, I need to get into the dashboard so I can add my custom header. First I click “Add to Dashboard” at the top of the page. Then I click “Appearance” in the left-hand menu.
To change the header, I click “Header” in the left-hand menu (it showed up when I clicked “Appearance”) and then browse to the header graphic I want to use. You will see what size header graphic they want on the page. The easiest method I found was to resize the graphic in Photoshop to the exact size they wanted before uploading it.
If you want a different size header graphic than the one you’re shown, look around at the different themes available to you. They will offer different size graphics.
I tried a couple of different file formats and found that the best format to save my header in is a non-transparent gif. Once I’d uploaded my graphic, I hit the “hide text” button and then “save changes.”
After saving, a “visit your site” link appeared at the top of the page. I clicked that to preview it:
There! I’ve set up my blog and done a custom header. That wasn’t so hard. Hope it helps you!
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Tags: Blogs, Melissa Esplin, Photoshop, Tutorials
Awesome post Mary!
Thanks, Spencer!
Mary, thank you for posting this. It inspired my daughter and I to jump in create our own blogs. I’ve run into a glitch though and was wondering if you have any advice. My daughter popped in a photo from her iPhoto library for a header, and was off and running. But I’m having trouble with my images being randomly accepted or rejected. I’ve even gone into PSE 8, created a 72 dpi image the exact pixel size they want, and have had random luck with it being accepted. I’ve contacted support and done everything they’ve suggested with no luck. Have you ever run into this?
Sorry for the long question, but I was so excited at 10 pm last night, now I’m quite frustrated.
Thanks so much,
Tami
Tami, I actually did run into this. Try saving it as a different file type. I hope you can get it.
I mean, if you saved it as a .gif before, try a .jpg.