-Server Side Includes-
Step by Step

Introduction
 
Most websites maintain the same headers, footers and margin navigations on each page. This is good design. The common look tells your visitor she is in a unified environment and ever-present links make site navigation easy.

As your site grows, changing those common elements can become laborious because changes must be made on each page of your growing site.

Using SSI (Server Side Includes), these elements need be changed only once. All your pages can use the same template files for important repeated elements of your web pages.

When you set up pages for SSI, you include special SSI links to separate template files. Your web server includes them in a single web page file before sending them to the visitors browser, thus the name Server Side Includes.

Convention used in this article: Filenames and URLs are often displayed in quotes. Do not use the quotes when doing your work.
 
To templatize your website with SSI,
you will need:
 
1.   FTP access to the root folder of your site (the folder which contains your home page, typically named "index.html" or "index.htm").

2.   Rights to add files and folders there.

3.   Basic knowledge of HTML, to the extent that you can recognize the beginning and ending of portions of your site you wish to templatize.

4.   A copy of your website on your local computer. If you have the items listed above, you can download your site to your local computer.

5.   Your site must be hosted on an Apache server with SSI enabled.

Continue to Step 1: Check if SSI is Available & Enabled