Viewing a page in Chrome, how to control content width independently of window width?

I often view webpages with sidebars on one or both sides of the main text. (E.g. the sidebar with related questions to the right of this question.) Sometimes, the webpage designer makes the sidebars a fixed width, but fails to specify a fixed or minimum width for the main text. When I reduce the width of the browser window, the width of the main text gets squeezed down to only a few words per line.

I would like to force Chrome to render the webpage at some arbitrary width independent of the window width. Then I could reduce the window width as much as I want without squeezing the main text. Because the webpage would be wider than the window, I would need to scroll horizontally to see everything, but usually I don't care about seeing the sidebars anyway. How can I achieve this? Any other solutions to this problem?

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