Originally Posted by juggledad

you need to put &nbsp; in the title, nothing more. It will look like it vanishes but it will be there, if you look in the page source you should see <h3>&nbsp;</h3> - actually in your case, once it is in, you will see your image.

The problem is that Wordpress is printing out the letters &,n,b,s, and p and not interpreting it as a blank space. Here's a screen shot of what happened when I entered &nbsp; into the widget title:



The image appeared (YAY ) but the text is there...I feel like we are so close to the solution.

I found searching Google for "CSS Image Replacement" retrieved helpful results.

So I tried using technique 3 from this page:

<h1 class="technique-three">
	CSS-Tricks
</h1>

h1.technique-three {
	width: 350px; height: 75px;
	background: url("images/header-image.jpg");
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

Yet that didn't work either as again Wordpress is not accepting "<h1 class="technique-three">
CSS-Tricks
</h1>" as a valid title and instead strips the tags and outputs "CSS-Tricks". How can I bypass the title box in the widget area? I'm wondering if there is a file I can pull up and manually insert the title there? Yet how would this affect updating? Hmmmm...

This ended up working for me!

div.widget_awpcplatestads h3 {
display: block;
width: 180px;
height: 23px;
text-indent: -9999px;
background-image: url('http://www.myurl.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/LatestClassifieds.png');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: center center;
}

Thanks for all the help everyone!

odd you couldn't use the &nbsp; when I could, but there are generally more than one way to do things, so I'm glat to have helped and that you've got it fixed.