A WordPress blog theme can be customized with your very own header options. You might have someone professionally design a header for you or plug in a template header you got free or paid for as part of a package.
There are many cool things you can do with headers. To start, let’s go over how to change your header initially. You need to know what size the header is. To get the height and width, go into your theme and right click on the header and choose “inspect element.”
This will open up a section at the bottom of your screen that shows you the height and width of the image. If you choose a header that doesn’t fit, it will throw off the look of your WordPress theme.
You can host the new header on your server. Just log into your cpanel, click on the domain and then on the wp-content folder. Then click on themes, and then the particular theme that you want to alter the header in.
You can click on Images and then headers and upload the new header option that you want to use. Or, if you’re familiar with it, you can alter the header file directly in the themes folder.
There are some other neat things you can do with your WordPress header images. You can install the WP Unique Article Header Image Plugin that will show a different header for every page and post that you create!
This type of header will be static for that particular post or page. It won’t change. But there are also things you can do to rotate the WordPress header while the visitor is still on the page.
You have the ability to set the changing time. So for example, you might set the header to rotate out every 5 or 10 seconds. Some people don’t like this type of rotation because they feel it’s a distraction to the content on their blog, but others enjoy the higher technical appeal of it.
You can do this two ways – use a plugin, such as JS Banner Rotate – or learn how to manually code the WordPress blog to do the job for you. This is a much more intensive operation that could be daunting for the newbie blogger.
WordPress Video Embed Tutorial
These days, blogs are far from the boring text only sites they were in the past. Now they are multi media entities, and the hottest media format you can use right now is video! Now even if you’re not familiar with how to make videos, or you don’t want to be on screen, you can utilize WordPress video embedding options to help create a better experience for your visitors.
If video isn’t your thing, then you can just use other people’s YouTube videos to post on your own blog. First you want to go to YouTube and type in the keyword phrase for the type of video you want to use.
If you’re selling or promoting items yourself, then try to find one where the creator of the video doesn’t have his or her URL splashed all over the content. Once you find a good video, click on the Share button below the video.
A section will appear so that you can grab whatever you need – the URL or you can click on Embed and grab the entire embed code for your WordPress blog. After clicking on that, uncheck the box that says, “Show suggested videos when the video finishes.”
By unchecking this box, you won’t have a string of related videos under the video that you’ve chosen to be shown on your blog. Having those extra videos means there’s additional link leakage to worry about and you want visitors converting for you, not your competition.
Under those boxes, you have the ability to resize the video. Now sizing depends on the theme that you’re using. If you have a three-column theme with content in the middle, then you might need a smaller video size than if you had two columns with a roomy content area and smaller sidebar.
It defaults to the 425×349 setting, but you can also choose from 480×390, 640×510, 960×750 or customize it to the width and height of your choosing. After you make your selection, go back up and copy the code to embed it on your WordPress blog.
You want to go back to your blog post and ensure that you’re set to HTML, not visual settings for the blog post. Paste the HTML embed code that you copied from YouTube into the blog post.
Make sure it appears to be working correctly after you publish the blog post. Keep in mind that if the video owner ever deletes the video, you’ll have to go in and fix your blog post to replace it with another one.