Creating global section in ASP

[qcom]

Hello everyone, I was just wondering if it was possible to use ASP to designate certain sections of a web site, like leftnav, content, footer, etc.And then just edit them as separed .aspx files and insert them where I want into a page.So if I just create just 1 .aspx file for the footer, I could just link to that .aspx file in every page that I wanted that footer to appear.Is that possible, I think I saw it being done before, I have NO experience with ASP so I hope this isn't super difficult! :)Thanks,BOSS

[Synook]

http://www.w3schools.com/asp/asp_incfiles.asp

[qcom]

http://www.w3schools.com/asp/asp_incfiles.asp

Cool, thanks!But, overall is this a good idea for creating pages like a footer.aspx because I use that section like all the time, and for say my leftnav?Does it have any cons like worse pagerank (for what ever reason ) or something like slower load times?

[justsomeguy]

The cons are negligible, the pros outweigh anything. It's much easier on maintenance when you only need to edit information in one place. Any information that your site duplicates across pages would be better in an include file, it's just easier to maintain the site. The only thing that matters with pagerank is the output to the browser. When you use include files and view the source of your page online, that's the same thing the search engine sees.

[qcom]

Cool, so your saying when you 'view source' (or the equivalent) then the bots would view the exact thing.Wouldn't that be bad though, because all of your content, and therefore your keywords, would be located on a separate file, or would the search engines then index that file and add that pagerank (in the case of google) to the page that is collecting all of those .aspx files?

[Synook]

If you include a file server-side, the user agent sees a single file. It can't somehow figure out that in reality your page is multiple files patched together. For example, this thread's page is generated dynamically from many sources - but it ends up as one page in the end.

[justsomeguy]

Just view the source, Luke, and your questions will be answered. If you take a page and split up all of the content, and then include it back together, the source in the browser does not change at all. The search engine would see the exact same thing.