WordPress Theme Park

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.