Website assistance, please

[nonionay]

Okay, so I'm trying to update my website. Right now, it's in basic html and CSS. What I want to do is update the header and sidebars on every page quickly, and I'm told there's a way to do it so that you just update one file, and everything changes.
Can anyone please tell me how to do that?

(Every time I fiddle with my website, and think I've got it just right, I go back and think, how the hell did I miss that? At the moment, one of my big issues can't be fixed until I get access to Photoshop. But the header and sidebar stuff, that I can fix. Again and again.)

Comments

[griffinwords.livejournal.com]

If you're trying to adjust the formatting of the header and sidebars, then you want to edit the CSS file's definition of those areas.

If you're talking about changing the text/image content of the header and sidebars, across every page on your website by changing only one file, that would normally be done by using a PHP "include." Each page in your site would include a reference separate PHP files for "header" and for "sidebars," so by editing just those two PHP files, every page's header and sidebar content would be updated.

[shadesofmauve]

The include can even reference plain ol' html files, to make it less complex.

It looks like this:
<?php include ("header.html") ?>

(Hopefully that works -- I had to use html character entities so it wouldn't try to think it was actual code).

Any page that uses this text has to end in .php instead of .html, but you shouldn't have to change anything else.