When you come to design a website, it can be laborious to have to enter the menu code on every single page across your website. It can be even harder work if you have many pages on your site and you want to make one small change on all of them. However, if you use server side includes, all of the hard work is taken out of this simple task. As leading providers of website design Cardiff and web design Wales, we know how handy SSIs can be.

Server side includes are files which can be called into each of your web pages as they load. For example, you only need to create one menu file and simply enter some code on each page which will call up the menu file as the page loads. This means that if you want to change a menu item (from SEO Cardiff, to SEO Wales, for example), you only need to do it on one page rather than on every page on the website.

Server side includes are created in different ways depending on which server set up you use. If you use a Microsoft server, youll need to use ASP includes and save your files with a .asp file extension. If you use a Linux server, you can use PHP includes and save your files with a .php file extension, a .shtml file extension (if using HTML includes) or even a .html file extension if you set your server directives to parse .html files with server side includes in the .htaccess or php.ini file.

Whichever way you choose to do it, server side includes are absolutely ideal for rendering titles, menus, repeating content and footer text and will save you a lot of hard work and man hours in the long run. Taking half an hour to learn how to use this technology will save you hours and hours over the life of each website you build and maintain.