By the end of this video your site is exactly as wide as you intend it to be, chosen from a dropdown rather than fought for in a stylesheet.
The eight choices
Expand Website's Width - W3CSS Theme in theme settings and open Choose the desired website's width. The options are Default at 1600 pixels, then 2560, 1920, 1360, 1280, 1024, 800, and finally 100 per cent, which lets the layout run to the edge of any monitor.
What it actually changes
This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why the result looks the way it does. The chosen class is not applied to the page as a whole. It is printed onto the inner wrapper of each full-width strip — the navigation bar, the welcome text band, the footer menu bar, the copyright bar and the main containers. The coloured bands therefore still span the whole browser window, while their contents line up in one consistent column down the middle of the page. Changing the setting realigns all of them at once, which is why it never leaves one strip out of step with the others.
Picking a number
- 1600, the default, suits most marketing and content sites on modern laptops.
- 2560 or 100% suit dashboards, data tables and image-led layouts where more horizontal room is genuinely used.
- 1024 or 800 suit documentation and long-form reading, where a short line length is easier on the eye than a wide one.
One stale instruction to ignore
Older material for this theme tells you to paste a class name into a text box and lists w3-width-1600 among the options. In the current release the field is a select list, and there is no 1600 entry in it — 1600 is the default, so it needs no class at all. If you are reading a guide that says otherwise, it predates this version.
The setting is the same across every Drupal version the theme supports, which its info file declares as 9 through 12. Full details on the W3CSS Theme project page; on Drupal 10.1 or newer, Solo is the successor line.
Want a Drupal theme built or customised around your brand rather than configured by hand? See Drupal theming services, or request a quote.
