WordPress CSS Trick: Image Titles in Sidebar

I was browsing through the WordPress.org support forum today when I came across a question that I thought was worthy of a blog post. The question was:

I am trying to change the titles of my sidebar widgets (i.e. “Pages,” “Recent comments,” “Meta,” etc) to images. Since my sidebar is widgetized, it seems this is more difficult than simply changing a few things in my sidebar.php document.

Does anyone have any tips?

It seems that with the implementation of widgets in later versions of WordPress, users have had some trouble customizing their sidebar titles with images. In early versions of WordPress, one could just go into the sidebar.php file and replace the titles of sidebar sections with an image using the good ol’ fashion HTML tag. This is no longer possible since widgets are dynamically added to the sidebar and are no longer located in the sidebar.php file.

Although I personally would rather use text to title sections on my sidebar, for the reduce loading times and various other reasons, using an image can allow you to use non-standard fonts and add a bit of flare to your blog. I’m going to show you have to achieve this using a bit of “detective work” and CSS.