Using Include Pages to manage your web site

One of the most important steps in designing a web site is prior planning.  Years ago, when I first started designing web sites for people, I would create the design, save one page as a "template" and then open my template, add new content and save it under a different name until I had all the pages in the site completed. This was fine until the owner of the site wanted to add a change, like a new menu item, to the site.  Then I would have to open each and every page to add the change.  This was ok for small sites but I worked on maintaining a site that was over 800 pages and it took a long time to re-design each page.

That's when I discovered Include Pages.

A typical web site consists of 4 basic parts; a Header, a Footer, a Navigation Menu and Content (see Fig).  

The header, menu and footer are generally the same globally throughout your site and can change the most often.  To cut down on the time it takes to make global updates to your site you can use "included" pages.

Included pages allow you to display an HTML or ASP page on another page in your web, allowing you to maintain separate pages. For example, to display a copyright notice on several pages in a web, create one page that contains the copyright notice, and include that page on other pages in the web. When you update the copyright notice, you simply update that one page; all other pages that include the copyright page will be automatically updated.

Note   This feature only works for pages in a web.

1. In Page view, position the insertion point where you want to include a page.
2. On the Insert menu, point to Component, and then click Insert Page.
3. In the Page to include box, type the relative URL of the page to include, or click Browse to find the file.

If you look at the HTML source code you'll see a line that looks like this:

<!--webbot bot="Include" U-Include="myfile.htm" TAG="BODY" -->

In addition to using the FrontPage Include Component, you can also manually put Server Side Includes into your page.  These look like

<!-- #include file="myfile.htm" -->

No matter which method you choose, using include files will greatly speed up the time it takes you to update your web site.

Last update: 1/20/2003; 8:25:45 PM.

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