A few questions about layout

  • current site: https://www.capp-ware.com/wordpress (doing setup here)
    Theme: intrepidity

    1) Does anyone know how to decrease the width of the sidebar, while increasing the width of the page text? I’m barely going to be using the sidebar at all since this is my company site and not a blog, but I will have a lot of info being scrunched together. I tried searching for this but couldn’t find anything about this specific theme.
    Also, if I remove all the widgets and leave the sidebar sections blank, it displays all of them anyway. So, I have to leave something in at least 1 of them, just to keep the rest hidden. Is there a way to completely disable them and use the rest of the space for my pages?

    2) Does anyone have a suggestion for how to handle this: I have my navigation bar setup and have nested pages for my software I sell. Well, each software page will have a half dozen sub-pages each. So, instead of forcing people to click through a lot of nested pages on the nav bar, what do you guys recommend for having a second navigation menu/bar on the pages themselves to navigate around that software’s pages?

    3) Tags. I have the plug-in installed called “All in one SEO”, and when creating pages, have entered relevant keywords for each page. But, if I use the Tag Cloud widget, nothing shows up. I know tags are a good thing to have indeed, but I’m a newbie when it comes to meta and such. Any advice?

    Thank you in advance.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • For the first question: do you want to decrease the width of the sidebar, or get rid of it altogether?

    Thread Starter cappware

    (@cappware)

    I would like to know how to both options if possible, so I can see what would work best.
    But if I had to only choose 1 thing, it would be how to remove them.

    Also, I’ve been searching but haven’t found anything yet…is there a way to make the sidebar unique for certain pages? That would make my sub-page navigation work even better.

    Thank You

    Yes, it is possible to create multiple sidebars and include them conditionally, if you are willing to hack the templates. Check out these articles:

    https://www.ericlightbody.com/2009/04/30/adding-multiple-sidebars-and-other-elements-to-your-wordpress-theme/

    https://www.rlmseo.com/blog/multiple-wordpress-sidebars-with-get_sidebar/

    If you’d rather just remove the sidebar altogether, you can do that easily by adding two lines to the bottom of your style.css file:

    div#sidebar { display: none; } /* get rid of the sidebar */
    div#left-col { width: 890px; } /* expand the main column */

    Thread Starter cappware

    (@cappware)

    Awesome. I’ll read over those articles and see if that is what I want to do. They are a tad confusing as I’m very new to web coding and some of the examples use an older version of WordPress so the interface looks different. I’ll definitely jump back on here if I decide to take that route.

    How would I go about just shrinking the sidebar a bit and increasing the main column? I’m assuming to use the second line you posted, but don’t know what I’d use to decrease the size of it.

    Thread Starter cappware

    (@cappware)

    OK, after reading through both posts, I’m still completely lost. All the files and functions they mention, I can’t find any trace of in my theme. The screenshot examples are for older builds so they look completely different too.

    I don’t want to have to completely alter the code of the theme just to get it to work if possible, but i can’t find another theme that looks of functions like I need it too.

    I’d like to have the option of a sidebar for various things, and a dynamic sidebar that changes per page would be great, but I haven’t a clue as to how to do that.

    Anybody have any suggestions or comments on my other 2 questions?
    Thank You

    In your theme, the widths for the main column and the sidebar are being set here:

    https://capp-ware.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/intrepidity/style.css (starting at line 75):

    #left-col {width: 616px; float: left; padding: 28px 0 0 0; overflow:hidden }

    #sidebar {float: right; width: 275px; color: #525252; padding: 1px 0 10px }

    If you want to change them, subtract a number of pixels from the #sidebar width, and add that same number of pixels to the #left-col width.

    Thread Starter cappware

    (@cappware)

    Ok, if I adjust the Sidebar width down to say 220px and add the 55 to left-col width at 671px, the right sidebar shrinks ok, but it cuts off part of the graphics for the sidebar widget header. Nothing but an aesthetics thing, but it does work.
    That does seem to at least widen the page a little bit though.

    Thank You.

    Now, does anyone have any input about an updated way to do dynamic sidebars or the other questions?

    ok – can someone tell me how to adjust the width of the marginin which the entry date sits. It’s dead space, and I either want to shrink it, or increase it to stick adsense in there

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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