Add a header widget to the twentyfourteen theme?

Question

I would like to add a widget to the header area (above the main menu) of the WordPress Twenty Fourteen theme. Ideally this would cut down the size of the header image from the full width to half, with the other half of the area holding the new widget.

I am not well versed in php, css, java, or any other useful stuff like that, so the more simple the solution, the better. I've looked at this question, but it doesn't make sense to me.

I've not been able to locate a plug-in which achieves this outcome, but a plugin would certainly be my preferred way of doing this, as I can then easily do it across multiple sites if required.

(Asked this on Webmaster SE - the answer there didn't make a lot of sense to me either.)

Answer 1

Each theme has different "Widget areas", so if the theme you are using doesn't have the one you would like, there are unfortunately not so many options. Or at least, not without editing the template files.

I found this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-widget-area/ which seem to do what you need, although it hasnt been updated in a long while, so might work or not, but seem worthwhile to give a try...

Other options would be, as mentioned by the webmaster who answered, to change theme to one that has a widget area in the header.

If you have a lot of other changes to do to the template might be a good idea to learn how wordpress template work, and get some basic notions of html, css and php. There are plenty of resources, personally I have used lynda.com and https://learnable.com/.

If you don't have so many changes as to make it worthwhile the investment time, and don't want to mess with code, I would recommend you hire someone to do it for you.