You can toggle sidebars on or off. If you have a no sidebar layout you can set the content area to be wide or narrow. This is a long post, you can jump straight to the settings.
Do your site visitors use a laptop or large PC monitor to view your website?
Are you thinking “how should I know”?
If you run Google Analytics on your website you will know what browser and what screen size your site visitors use. You might find that most of your site visitors read your pages using smart phones or tablet computers.
If most people are view your site using mobile phones, you might not want sidebars on your web pages.
Mai Reach theme works with or without sidebars
If you choose a no sidebar layout you can then choose from three page content widths.
- wide content width
- standard content width
- narrow content width
Use wide content width for fancy homepages
If you want to make a fancy page layout, on your homepage for instance. You’ll probably want to use the wide content width option. This gives you more room if for instance you want to place three images side by side. Or you want to use one of the Atomic Blocks ready made homepage layouts.
Use standard content width for most of your pages
Most of the time, if you’re not using a sidebar, you’ll use the standard content width. Standard content width gives you enough space to put three images side by side. But the page won’t be so wide that your paragraphs become hard to read.
Use narrow content width for text heavy pages
A narrow content area makes your sentences and paragraphs easier to read. If you write long text heavy articles, the narrow content width might be just what you and your readers need.
Quick recap. You can have a left hand sidebar, a right hand sidebar or no sidebar.
- A wide content area is great if you’re using a plugin like Atomic Blocks to build a fancy homepage design.
- A narrow content area is ideal for text heavy pages.
- Most of the time, if you don’t use a sidebar, you’ll probably use the standard content width.
Look at the images below to see what I mean.
Content Sidebar Page Layout Wide Content Page Layout Standard Content Page Layout Narrow Content Page Layout
Setting the default (site wide) page and post layouts
You set the default page layouts by going to…
Dashboard > Appearance > Customize > Theme Settings > Site Layouts
This is what the default layout settings look like…
Defaults
First choose the default (site wide) settings.
Posts
As you drill down through the various settings, you can fine tune exactly which page and post types have which page widths. Or, if you wanted to, you could set all blog posts to have a content-sidebar layout.
Pages
Here I’ve set pages to have wide content. You might want your pages to have narrow content, or content-sidebar. Experiment and see which layouts you like best.
Miscellaneous
At the bottom of the customizer settings you find miscellaneous post types, such as the search results page and the author archives page.
If you work through all of these settings carefully. You can control what content layout type you want for almost any page type.
You can override these default layout settings on a post by post basis
As you write any web page or blog post…
- click the Genesis icon in the top right corner of the post editor screen.
- expand the layout tab and choose a layout from the drop down list
So for instance, if you use a default layout of standard content width (no sidebar) on all posts. But you want to have a content-sidebar layout on this specific post, you can.
»