6. Page templates

Since most sites have certain aspects of the site that remain the same as the content of the pages changes, we are going to create a template that we can use for all pages. We'll divide the page into four sections:

   _____________________
  |                     |
  |         top         |
  |                     |
  |---------------------|
  |      |              |
  |      |              |
  | left |     main     |
  |      |              |
  |      |              |
  |---------------------|
  |                     |
  |        bottom       |
  |_____________________|

The "main" section holds the content that is different for each page. The "top" section is for headers, banners, menus, and so on. The "left" section can be used as a sidebar or navigation bar, and the "bottom" section can contain the copyright and contact info. The top, left, and bottom sections will remain constant throughout the site. Making a change to information in one of these sections will make that change to all pages in your site.

Now type the HTML for each template section in an individual plain text file in the catalog directory, named 'top', 'left', and 'bottom', respectively using the code displayed below. No '.html' suffixes are used on these because they are not meant to be parsed directly by Interchange as full pages.

top

left

bottom

The Interchange Tag Language