Well, in the defense of your mentioned programmer, it very well might be more complicated than it looks at first glance. Having worked for two different news o

Well, in the defense of your mentioned programmer, it very well might be more complicated than it looks at first glance. Having worked for two different news organizations in my past, I've an unfortunately large amount of experience with the crufty kinds of integrations that lots of newspapers use for doing everyday things like providing classified ads, e-commerce sales, etc -- it's extremely common for varying areas of the site to be served by entirely different software stacks cleverly masked in such a way to make the branding appear continuous. In the worst of those cases I worked with years ago, your only method available for changing the "header" (not HTML header, of course) involved copying/pasting HTML with manually-inlined style declarations into a text area on the partner's website. It's probable that he or she was just simplifying things for you, and that you're just unaware of the actual underlying complexities; although changing the color on the wordpress site's navbar sounds pretty clearly trivial at first glance, the full spectrum of places to which that change would have to be manually copied might be extensive, undocumented, and tedious enough to alter that "No, that's impossible" is the go-to answer instead of spending time explaining why something sounding so trivial might actually amount to many hours of effort.