Making header width match page width
 

The site I am struggling to webmaster is ALL Power Labs. I am a designer not a coder, and so keep getting stumped. I am trying and failing to make a new header image appear the same width as the overall page.

Our version of Atahualpa is 3.7.10, and this is the style for the header

<td id="header" colspan="3">

<div style="width:auto; margin-left:auto;margin-right: auto;"><a href="http://www.allpowerlabs.com"><img src="http://www.gekgasifier.com/wp-content/themes/apl_04/images/header/OrangeWebHeaderSimp.png" /></a></div>

Thanks for the help.

If you upgrade Atahualpa, one of the new options is full width headers and full width footers

When I took over the site, I innocently did a very overdue WP upgrade, from 3.x.x to 4.1.5, and completely crashed the site, as apparently so many parts were out of date. I had to get a mess of help from our controls guys, who are coders, but they needed a mess of help from our host and others to get it back up.

How much chance is there that if I upgrade to Atahualpa 3.7.23 I will make another mess?

Also, I thought to just try and largely duplicate the header image by formatting the title, tag, horizontal bars and logo, but could not get any of that to appear. The theme appearance page shows things like this:
%image %bar1 %logo %bar1 %pages,
But I don't know what the % represents. I am used to seeing it appear in the place of spaces in file names, and so wonder if it is just a place holder here, perhaps standing in for div, id, span or whatever.

Step 1 of any upgrade is to do a full backup so you can recover if an issue happens. Did you do a full backup ie database and all files??

You should also go read the on screen documentation on the atahualpa option pages to see what they do.

Thanks for the help! I've read all the page options and am not sure how to use them, especially what the % sign represents.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7...U0U&authuser=0

I'm not sure if the code I enter here is active, or if I have to modify it somewhere else. I don't think I actually want a full width header, but just want it to match the width of the margins on the left and right sidebars, and thought those auto width settings would do that.

the 'Configurre Header Area' options are how you configure the header of the site. The order right to left will translate to tob to bottom so if you had
%bar1 %logo %cats %bar2 %pages %bar1
they would show
%bar1
%logo
%cats
%bar2
%pages
%bar1
Each one of the %xxxx is a substitution for the item - i.e. %pages will insert a horizontal list of your page menu items.

You can also add html in this section so you could have:
%bar1 %logo %cats <img src='yourdomain.com/path/to/the/image.jpg /> %bar2 %pages %bar1
and it would put the image between the category nenu and the 'bar' you define later in the settings.

You need to experiment and see what each change does and remember, like anything, you won't learn it in a day so just do a little at a time.

It also helps to have a play site to mess with.