WordPress Theme Park

Jul.09.2007
11:57 am
by Sadish

How to properly hide the title of your blog?

This is one of the most common customizations that people want to do in their wordpress blog.

They want to hide their site’s title from displaying at their header. It is most probably because their header image already has it as part of the image itself.

Lets take a look at the most common approaches people take, for doing this.

Approach (1) : Delete the blog’s Title through Options Page

People go ahead and login to their wordpress, click on the Options and they look at the text box with the label “Weblog Title”. They just clear the text in that box and click on “Update Options”.
Start from

Click to Zoom!
and make it look like

Click to Zoom!

Wow ! That seems to work., isn’t it ?

Wait a minute, lets take a closer look !
As a result of your change, the following undesirable effects were created.

Issue #1 : Search Engines do not see the site’s title

You only intended your site’s title to hide from your vistor’s eyes, but now even search engine’s can not see your site’s title.
A site’s title enclosed in <h1> and </h1> tags, is one of the main things, search engines look at when they crawl around your site.
If the search engines do not know your site’s title, how will they display your site as part of any search results.?

Issue #2 : Site Title does not appear in the browser’s top bar

If the user has opened many browser windows or browser tabs, he/she may not be able to find the window/tab that your website is on.

Issue #3 : Site’s Feeds do not display a title, either

If the user subscribes to your RSS Feeds, they also do not display your site’s title.

Some feed reader softwares also reject feeds that do not have a title.

Oh my God! This approach has some serious issues, isn’t it ?

Approach (2) : Delete the line from header.php

Somewhat knowledgeable users open up the header.php in the theme directory. They know what is the line that causes the title to display in the header.
They just look for

<h1><a href="<?php bloginfo('siteurl');?>/" title="<?php bloginfo('name');?>"><?php bloginfo('name');?></a></h1>

and delete the whole line or make it

<h1></h1>

Yes. Now the site’s title do not appear in their header and they are happy !

Wait, They will still have the Issue #1 as we discussed for Approach #1.

Approach (3) : Hiding it through CSS Style definition

If we really think about the problem at hand, it is very simple. We want to hide the site’s title from the header of the site, as we already have the site’s title as part of the header image.
We only have to hide it from people browsing the site in the browser, and not from the search engines or feed readers.
Lets take a look at the CSS based solution for this.

Add

#header h1 { display:none }

at the end of style.css and save it.

Now let’s refresh the site and see if the title is hidden. It is still showing up? You have to clear your browser’s cache and refresh the page again.

Ok…Now it seems to work !

Is there any of the Issues 1, 2 and 3 as we discussed earlier ?

Nope !

Well, may be this is the proper way to hide the site’s title from the header ?

I believe so !

Disclaimer :

This would work in most of the wordpress themes [at least the ones that I created]. If it does not work in one of my themes, please go to Support Forums for my themes and if it is someone else’s theme, please contact the author of that theme.
Commenting on this post for help with your site, is not recommended.

Thanks.

Filed in CSS Tips, Common Theme Issues, WordPress Tips |

18 Responses to “How to properly hide the title of your blog?”

WordPress Themes by Sadish » How to properly hide the title of your blog?on 09 Jul 2007 at 12:09 pm 1

[...] want to hide the title of your blog from your header ? Please read my post at WP ThemePark [...]
How to properly hide the title of your blog? « Sadish and WordPresson 10 Jul 2007 at 3:36 pm 2

[...] can learn about the issues with each one of those approaches and find the best solution at my article at WP [...]
Hugo Maeson 02 Aug 2007 at 1:53 pm 3

I found out about the header.php thing of course, but I didn’t realize that was SE-unfriendly. Thanks for the tip!
c. dicksonon 02 Aug 2007 at 10:41 pm 4

Thank you for pointing me over here! The header is now corrected.
Jessicaon 22 Aug 2007 at 6:05 pm 5

THANK YOU!!

Thank you SO much for this rule, it has helped me SO much.

Jessica
Kobeon 09 Sep 2007 at 4:39 pm 6

At first,i want to thank you for your solution.My problem though is that the title of my blog disappears only in home page.It is still there in single posts and pages.Can u help us with this too?

I’m not using your theme
Kobeon 09 Sep 2007 at 5:00 pm 7

Ok,i got another solution.I added “visibility: hidden;” in the stylesheet to every line referring to header. Thanks again.Regards from Greece
angelaon 29 Sep 2007 at 8:00 am 8

Hi,
Using your Paalam Theme with modifications, I actually needed to add these 2 lines to remove the visible header text:

#header h1 { display:none }
#header h2 { display:none }

THANKS for a great useful theme - I am just starting out with WordPress and I love the simple and elegant theme you have created.

-Angela
marton 30 Oct 2007 at 1:42 pm 9

I’m using the theme ‘beautiful day’

to get around the problem i set the font size to 0em, seems to work!

.header .left {
background: #B3C2C7 url(’img/header.jpg’) no-repeat;
line-height: 150px;
text-align: center;
width: 564px; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; font-weight:normal; font-size:0em; font-family:Trebuchet MS, sans-serif
Tarky7on 01 Nov 2007 at 11:01 pm 10

Thanks for pointing me here Sadish. As usual, you are one of the most professional WordPress theme builders out there. My clients just love your themes, your backend toolkits make working with your themes a breeze.

Tarky7
wpTHEMEZILLA.comon 23 Nov 2007 at 5:42 pm 11

This is amazing information, thank you.
Zakmanon 05 Dec 2007 at 5:22 am 12

In the CSS file, the location where the title should appear is given in pixels.

So what I did on my blog was make the location something like 4000 px from the left margin, so the title is out of the range of the desktop screen, and hence not visible.

Yet it will appear in the browser top bar, because I’ve not removed the title in the Options page.
Sadishon 07 Dec 2007 at 11:18 am 13

Zakman,

That is possible too. but I heard that Google will consider your site a SPAM if you are using such tactics to hide something.
Again it is not confirmed, but it is just what I heard.

Thanks.
zakmanon 17 Jan 2008 at 3:53 pm 14

Yeah, Sadish, I agree there are possibilities that Google might consider my site because of the attempt at hiding some text.

This is the same as writing keywords on the site in the same color as the background, so humans can’t see it, yet the site is ‘rich’ with keywords.

But Google spiders are not human Google does penalize one for doing that!
Dennison 05 Mar 2008 at 2:34 am 15

Hi Sadish,

Thanks for putting up this solution as you’ve solved a problem of mine where I need to hide my blog title.

However, it still left with blog description. Possibilities to hide the description as well?

Thanks!

Regards,
Dennis.
Ronnie Annon 16 Apr 2008 at 11:50 pm 16

Hi Sadish!

I’m thinking of moving to WordPress.org and love your Seashore theme. I’m considering using it, but have two basic questions: (1) I know I can increase the size of the header image, but is there a way for me to suppress the blog name above the image? (and still retain SEO of course (-; ) and (2) Is it possible for me to move categories to the bottom of the post?

I hate asking this since it’s a beautiful design as is, but for my particular blog, these changes would be very helpful. I don’t know CSS, but I can follow code and insert or delete where told to!

Thank you for any help and for your lovely designs.

Ronnie Ann
WereBearon 17 Apr 2008 at 8:23 am 17

Thank you, thank you! You made my first venture into WordPress CODING a pleasure, and solved a nagging problem for me.
Wing Faton 11 May 2008 at 5:39 pm 18

Dennis: Add this to the bottom of style.css:
.description { display:none }