Website Design Questions

I currently play around with my personal website, and I've tried out a lot of different things to see how they work.

I like to keep things simple.

With that being the major design priority, I currently have everything in plain structured html and external CSS. I would like to not repeat stuff for every page. If I want to change something like the footer or header, I want to only change it in one place, not every page on my server as is currently the case.

I have seen php pages using templates to do this - theres an external file that holds the header and footer contents, and you include the external file in your page, then just do something like "show header" in the page. If you want to change the header and footer across your entire site, you just change it in that one external template file and the changes take effect across the entire domain because everything refers to that template file.

So, what are my options for doing this? Should I rewrite my html pages in PHP?

http://imog.us

yeah, i would just use server side includes.

here is a page with a decent amount of info about all different choices for doing includes:
http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_include_one_html_file_inside_another.html

i imagine you are using either apache or iis. i don't think you have to really do anything in terms of renaming the files. definitely not recoding them in anyway besides replacing the sections you would like to use includes with. it just depends on what method you use. i haven't messed with includes in a good couple years (i am not really a web designer at all)

Good answer and link, thanks!

I.M.O.G. said:

Good answer and link, thanks!

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no problem. with the renaming of the files, that depends on the approach as you'll find out when trying it out.

definitely much easier to find more info & examples when you know the appropriate term to search for.

Ya, it does help. heh

On the other hand, it doesn't help when your host doesn't support server side includes.

Debating whether I want to pay the extra bucks for 1and1 to give me SSI (I think the difference of $4 to $10 to go from beginner package to small business package), or if I want to look at other options. I should probably just host it myself. Guess I've avoided taking the time to do it... tho my Gentoo install has stabilized, so I guess I have the time I spent on that freed up.

cant you do that with css?

Mr.Guvernment said:

cant you do that with css?

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I would think not, but I'm no expert. CSS is supposed to just be styling, and if you were using it to do content you'd be mixing up what its designed for. So if possible, it would be a bad idea methinks.

k, wasnt sure, i am by no means a web guy, but it is stuck in my head that with css you could link to a txt file to simply change content within the text file with out needing php, i will see if i can dig anything up :d

Mr.Guvernment said:

k, wasnt sure, i am by no means a web guy, but it is stuck in my head that with css you could link to a txt file to simply change content within the text file with out needing php, i will see if i can dig anything up :d

Click to expand...

Cool, let me know what you find... You may be thinking of external style sheets, which I'm doing now. This is when every page references a txt file thats CSS formatted, and making changes to the text file changes the appearance of the content, but the actual content is not altered.

yeah I used SSIs when I made my site so the header/footer/nav was all in their own files and I wouldent need to jump around fixing it. I then jumped to an ajax system to do about the same thing.