Sidebar location

  • Unknown's avatar
    aliciadean1835 · Member ·

    I would like my sidebar/widgets to only show up on my home page, but they also show up on my blog page, which makes it look very crowded. Can I have it show up only on home page?

    Thank you

  • Unknown's avatar
    designsimply · Member ·

    You can use widget visibility settings for that. Check out this help page that shows how they work:

    Widgets

  • Unknown's avatar
    aliciadean1835 · Member ·

    This is great. Thank you. I was able to get all of them to go away except the Meta one. It is still there, even though I put visibility as only the home page. I would also like my blog posts to be spread across the entire page, rather than just over to the right, as if the sidebar was still there. Can you help with that?

    Thank you!

  • Unknown's avatar
    designsimply · Member ·

    I looked through a few different pages on http://aliciadean.com/ and I can’t see the Meta widget. I might just be missing it. Could you please reply back here with a link of a page where you are seeing it?

    It almost looks like you figured out how to use the “One column, no sidebar” solution for most of the pages and that solved both problems at the same time. Is that what happened?

  • Unknown's avatar
    aliciadean1835 · Member ·

    Again, thank you for your help. I’m sorry to be so dense. :-) Actually, another person set up the website for me and she had it set up with the ‘One column, no sidebar’ already. And I’m a little confused because I think my Home page shows it’s set up that way, but the sidebar shows up.

    Here is the link to the page where the Meta still appears and where I would like the blog to go across the entire page. (At least the Meta still shows up for me. I wonder if I need to clear my cache or something?)

    http://aliciadean.com/alicias-blog/

    Thank you again for your patience and assistance.

  • Unknown's avatar
    designsimply · Member ·

    Your home page is currently setup to use the default template—so that’s why it shows the sidebar. But you could switch it if you wanted to. Here is the related help page with instructions:
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/page-attributes/

    Aha! This page is different: http://aliciadean.com/alicias-blog/

    That is the posts page, so it’s not a type of page that can have that “One column, no sidebar” option applied to it.

    The Meta widget must be a default widget that appears only if no other widgets are present. Since you modified the widget visibility for all of the other widgets so they only display on the home page, that’s why the Meta widget still thinks it needs to be displayed as the default. Here’s a super tricky way to get rid of it:

    1. Go to Appearance > Widgets
    2. Drag an empty Text Widget into the bottom of the “Secondary Sidebar” widget area.

    What that will do is make the posts page (http://aliciadean.com/alicias-blog/) think there’s another widget to display so it doesn’t have to show the default Meta one.

  • Unknown's avatar
    aliciadean1835 · Member ·

    You are a genius! Yes, that worked. Thank you so much. The only problem now is that my posts are all on the right side of the page, as if there were still a sidebar there. Is there a way to make it go across the entire page?

    Thanks again for your help!

  • Unknown's avatar
    designsimply · Member ·

    Is there a way to make it go across the entire page?

    There are two ways.

    One would be to go to Appearance >Theme Options in your blog dashboard and select the “Full-Width, No Sidebar” option. However, that will change the layout for your entire blog, including the homepage.

    If you want to make changes to just the posts page and not the homepage, you could make a customization like that if you purchased the Custom Design upgrade. Check it out at this link to see if that looks like something you might like to do:
    https://store.wordpress.com/premium-upgrades/custom-design/

    If you do like the upgrade, reply back here and I will help you with some custom CSS, or you can always post in the CSS forms for help with customization help like that:
    https://en.forums.wordpress.com/forum/css-customization/

  • Unknown's avatar
    aliciadean1835 · Member ·

    Awesome! I just purchased the upgrade. I love the idea of being able to use different fonts, among other advantages, especially changing the appearance of my blog page without changing all the pages. Any help you can offer for custom CSS would be greatly appreciated. For further questions that come up, I can go to the forum. Thank you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    designsimply · Member ·

    That’s so great! I can totally help you with some CSS!

    The first thing you’ll need to know is that CSS is theme specific. Should you change themes in the future, you’ll need to add new CSS for the new theme.

    To target just your http://aliciadean.com/alicias-blog/ page, we can use a class from the “body” tag in the HTML. The class name in this case is “blog” and so that means we’ll start our CSS selector with “.blog”

    Here is an example to illustrate, this will turn the content area into a single column, full-width layout just on the blog page:

    .blog.three-column #content {
	margin: 0;
	width: 100%;
}

    I noticed that single posts had the same layout issue, and you’ll probably want to apply the same rules to those pages as well. To do that, you can add a selector for the “single” class name and stack them like this:

    .blog.three-column #content,
.single.three-column #content {
	margin: 0;
	width: 100%;
}

    You should enter that as the final code in the Appearance → Themes → Customize → CSS panel in your blog dashboard.

    If you want to dig deeper into learning CSS (it’s fun!) then this is a great beginner tutorial:
    http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/

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