What is the best web hosting company for WordPress blogs?

If you have your own WordPress blog on your own domain you’ll need somewhere to host your files. And when you start looking round you’ll find that not all web hosts are created equal.

So what do you look for? Here’s my checklist:

• Must be reliable
• Must have cPanel with Fantastico and Simple Scripts
• Must provide superb technical support
• Must offer unlimited addon domains
• Must be reasonably priced

Why Fantastico and Simple Scripts? Because these two tools enable automatic creation of new WordPress blogs - no more manual uploading of all the WordPress files! And Simple Scripts not only lets you create a new WordPress blog with a few clicks of the mouse, you can now automatically upgrade WordPress when a new version is released. How cool is that?

I use Bluehost for my blogs. That’s where this blog is hosted and I now wouldn’t use any other service.

On a few occasions I’ve needed some technical support, particularly when I was new to blogging and wanted to do something beyond my ability(:-(), and I found their support staff helpful, smart and unfailingly patient.

It might be tempting to go to a small, cheap hosting service but you won’t get the reliability and quality of service that a larger company can provide. Trust me, I’ve learned that the hard way!

Click here to find out more about Bluehost WordPress hosting

Changing your WordPress blog’s header image is a great way to personalize it and to make your blog unique to you. So, is there an easy way to do it?

Yes - follow these steps and it should be straightforward.

1. Find out what your blog’s existing header image is called and find out its dimensions. The easiest way to do this is to display your blog in your browser and right-click the header. Depending on your browser, you want to click ‘Properties’ or ‘View background image’ or something similar which will let you see more information about the image. Note the filename of the image and its dimensions.
2. Now you need an image that you want to use instead. Open the image file in PhotoShop or Elements or some other image processing software. Crop and/or resize it to make it the same dimensions as your blog’s header. Then save it somewhere on your computer with the same name, and in the original image format (.jpg, .png, .gif), as the original header.
3. Then you’re going to upload your image to overwrite the one on your blog. Go into your FTP program, log in and navigate to your blog’s WordPress files. To find the header file, drill down to:
   • wp-content
   • themes
   • [your blog's theme]
   • images
4. You should see the image file in the file list there. It would be a good idea to rename this file so that if there is a problem you can rename it back to what it was. Now simply upload your amended image in place of the original header.

Now display your blog (you may need to refresh your browser). If the images displays OK, congratulations!

If the above routine doesn’t work, check that you’ve done everything properly. If there is any problem it probably means that your theme’s author designed the theme in a non-standard format.  The best way to proceed is now to visit the author’s blog (link in the footer) and ask how to change the header. There’s a good chance that someone has already asked the question and your answer may be there.

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It’s quite easy to put an image into your blog’s sidebar. Here are the steps to getting it right:

1. Make sure the image is the right size. Sidebar widths vary, but are usually 100 - 150 pixels.  You want your image to fit snugly in the sidebar. If necessary, resize the image with Photshop (or similar software) to the width you want it to display. It doesn’t matter if this isn’t exact, because you can adjust it when you see it, but the closer you can get to the actual width of your sidebar, the better the image will display. Leave the height proportional to the width as this is not a critical dimension in the sidebar.
2. Upload your image to your server using FTP. Conventionally, you will create a folder called ‘images’ in the same directory as your blog and upload the image to that folder.
3. Then log in to your blog’s dashboard and go to ‘Design’ (’Appearance’ in Wordpress 2.7) and click on ‘Widgets’. If you have more than one sidebar, display the one you want. Then, from the left-hand menu, click to add a text widget to the sidebar.
4. Click ‘Edit’ on that text widget and it will pop open. In the top line, add any heading you want displayed. This can be blank if you don’t want a heading. Then in the body of the widget, enter a snippet of HTML to display the image:<img border=”0″ src=”http://myblog.com/images/mypic.jpg” width=”125″ ></img>where ‘myblog.com’ is the domain of your blog and ‘mypic.jpg’ is the name of your image. Adjust this, if necessary, if your blog is on a sub-folder of your root directory.  Adjust the width to fit your sidebar.
5. Then click ‘Save’ (’Done’ in WordPress 2.7) to save the widget and ‘Save Changes’ to save the sidebar.

That’s it! Now view your blog to make sure that the image displays OK. If it doesn’t, then go back and tweak the width setting by editing the widget until it displays how you want.

If this post was helpful to you, please help me by stumbling, digging or otherwise sharing this post. Thanks!