In which I suddenly realize I don't know how to make web pages

Well, futzing with HTML won't let you do that, unless you do some wacky CSS. But what you really should be learning is PHP (or ASP if you're hosting on Windows). PHP should be fairly simple for you to learn, conceptually, and it will simplify your HTML reuse (as well as give you a lot more control over things, if you ever want).

I use Textpattern for content management, but it can be confusing. Way back when, I'd modularize all the different parts of my website with PHP. It's inelegant and there are better ways to do it, but it's easy and it always worked well for me. All you have to do is separate the different elements of your site (header, menu, footer, etc.) into html/php/whatever files and use PHP's http://us2.php.net/include/ function to place them into your page as desired. You'll want to hard-code the actual content into the page rather than include it. Well, you don't have to, but since the content will be unique for every page it'd just be an extra step. Repeat for every page. Then, whenever a change needs to be made to one of the site's elements (say a new section needs to be added to the menu), just edit your menu.php file and the changes will show up on every page that you've included that file. I hope I was clear enough in describing this. Someone else will probably post a better solution, but if this interests you at all and you'd like some dummy files to get a better idea of what I mean, my e-mail's in my profile.

The PHP include stuff seems like a good call, but what I'm curious about is how, if that's how PHP works, why a site that loads reusable data in PHP still show up as a raw HTML file. For example, my friend made http://www.americantablerestaurant.com/ (sadly I can't reach her to ask the coder directly right now) and I'm sure that it used PHP for almost all the content save for the internal copy, yet viewing the source, it looks like a normal HTML file.

XQUZYPHYR: Because it's all done server-side. In other words, the server takes that file, passes it to PHP, PHP spits out HTML, and the server passes the HTML to the the browser. The interpolation of your include is done on the server.

Ah. Well, PHP's ultimate goal in most situations is simply to output HTML. At least, in the situations where basic web designing is concerned. PHP files are served as text or HTML files by default on most webservers that support it. So, when someone visits a PHP webpage, the server-side PHP interpreter runs the code, and produces HTML that is sent to you. For example, when you go to a PHP BBS' thread listing page, the PHP code is authenticating you, checking for errors, talking to the database and outputting information based on certain parameters, yada yada, but by the time it actually reaches you it'll appear as plain jane HTML. Also, PHP files can contain HTML. In my example, the only actual PHP code that you'd need is the include function. And when you'd go to the website and view source, you won't be able to see any PHP code at all- it would have been processed and served as HTML. OP: What phrontist said. Web gurus, feel free to correct if I'm offering old or outdated information. I'm a little rusty.

Ugh, I feel like a moron after seeing that explanation. So basically, just so I'm clear here... I can make an HTML file, like index.html, and include a PHP tag to load, for example, topmenu.html? I'm not in a position to fully learn PHP just for this project but if you're saying that those tags are all I'd need for a simple project like this then it would just be a matter of making sure PHP is enabled on my friend's web server.

So basically, just so I'm clear here... I can make an HTML file, like index.html, and include a PHP tag to load, for example, topmenu.html Almost, but the file you create has to end in .php (and the server that's hosting the pages has to have PHP installed and enabled) in order for the PHP script to actually get processed by the server and not just served up as raw code.

At it's absolute simplest, you could put: <?php include("file.html"); ?>

What camcgee said. And don't be worried about just learning enough PHP to be dangerous- one of the great things about it is that it's very "forgiving" compared to a lot of similar solutions. I'd recommend reading some tutorials to get a decent grasp of how it works and whatnot, but don't feel bashful about learning enough to get what you need done and picking up the rest as you go- that's how a lot of people get their start. Also, many great PHP scripts assume no knowledge of PHP code outside of how to install it.