Designing your website with change in mind.
We all know that our websites seem to take of live of their own. As your site grows updating pages becomes more and more of a task. This is where server side includes (SSI) can make your site updates a lot easier and requires a lot less effort.
Visualize your page layout in sections. Most pages Usually contain a top (header) section, a navigation system, content, and then a footer (containing copyright info and date). Using server side includes you can maintain each section in a separate file making updating each section much easier. Instead of the old method of updating each page of your site individually, you can now update one file that will make the change for you on every page that the include was on.
Most hosting companies support server side includes. You will want to check with you host to make sure. Most Apache web-server ate typically configured to parse files ending in .shtml. An Apache server can be instructed to parse files with other extensions by using an .htaccess file. You can update your .htaccess file to parse .htm and .html file by adding in these two commands.
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .htm
If you do not have an .htaccess file you can simply create a file in your root directory named .htaccess and add the two commands above and save the file.
Create each section of your page you wish to be used as an include and save each section in a separate file and upload to your server. These files can contain any regular html that you wish to use. You can name these files with .txt extensions.
Now when creating a new content page you will want to use the include command to include the separate parts of your page.
For example: You are creating a page named your_content.htm. You would start off with the normal html:
/* To include the top part of your page. */
/* To include your navigation. */
Content
/* To include bottom of page. */