Hi all,
I am constantly updating our company website, but my skills lie in HTML and CSS at probably a basic/almost intermediate level. Our website has grown in size to the point that the pages have almost doubled.
I have a NEWS section down the left hand side of the page which displays on every page. As you can imagine updating 4 or 5 pages on a monthly basis isn’t too much to worry about but the site is now 16 pages in size and growing all the time.
What I would like to be able to do is update all pages from one source/location. Can I have one page that I make the changes on for updating the NEWS, then reference that page so that it pulls the information into each page.
The basic layout of the page can be seen here:
www dot avvb35 dot dsl dot pipex dot com / tsl / template2.htm
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Steve
Ok. Many thanks. Time to have a crack at it then!!
Hi Steve
You have a few options here.
One would be to use server-side includes. Instead of using the .htm file extension that your site currently uses, you would use a .shtml extension for the content that you would like to display on multiple pages (e.g. the news), and then reference that .shtml file on each page that you want the news to display. You need to configure your web server (it looks like you’re using IIS) to enable server-side includes for this to work.
This would be the least change from how you work presently, but it’s only really a temporary solution, because as your site grows then you’ll encounter other issues with scaling and maintaining it. What might be a better solution is to use a content management system (CMS), such as the free WordPress as the engine that powers your site. Using a CMS makes updating content across the entire site much easier, and WordPress even comes with a rich text editor, so once your site is set up then even people who don’t have a good grasp of HTML can make updates to the site. You could either download WordPress yourself and begin playing around with it to teach yourself, or you could pay someone to set up the site for you.
Hope that helps, good luck!
PS. The links in your Products dropdown all throw a File Not Found error. Might want to get them fixed 
PHP includes is another option, just create a file called ‘example.php’ and then put the include code in your HTML wherever you want the contents of that file to appear on the site, like this:
<?php
include(‘php_includes/example.php’);
>
So if you put that code in seven places, they’ll all show the content from the example file.
It’s clunky and not as good as using Wordpress or some other CMS but it’s quick and doesn’t mean having to competely rebuild the site. Your server needs to be able to run PHP but that’s pretty much default these days.
Thank you both for your responses.
The site as you were viewing it is in my personal webspace for testing hence why the products dropdowns don’t work yet as I haven’t done the pages for them yet
The live site is sat on a UNIX/LINUX platform so I think the PHP route may be the more favourable.
I don’t know anything about PHP so I will be researching more about this here. As the only thing I really need to update on a regular basis is that NEWS section across multiple pages any clunkyness can be forgiven.
Is it really as simple as creating a file called whatever.php in notepad or Dreamweaver as this is my tool of choice. Then inserting that little bit of code you listed?
Once again thank you for your help in this matter.
Yep, and it would have to be that simple because I’m a PHP dunce.