The modular design of the page

A modular approach to page design can save time in developing and maintaining a web site. A page template may be created and the different components of the page plugged in where appropriate. No tools other than a text editor are required. This will involve "including" files within one another. Since this necessitates server-side processing some kind of server will be required.

When you look at a page on any major web site, chances are that the page was put together at the last moment, right before you viewed it.

Modern web site design has moved away from the idea that each page is a static entity, and toward the idea that each page is a dynamic entity pieced together on the fly by the web server.

The idea behind this is that one piece of the page - say, a banner or a table of contents - can be created once and used over and over again. Each time a web page is requested by a user, the banner or the table of contents is added to the page right then and there.

Web designers use this modular structure because it makes large sites (and even small sites) easier to design. If the site adopts a new logo, for example, the change needs to be made to only one file - the one defining the banner. The change is then reflected across the entire site.

Each of the four areas bordered by the yellow boxes is defined in a separate file. In this case, the four ares are:

· The Banner at the top of the page

· The Contents at the left side of the page

· The content at the right of the page

· The Footer at the bottom of the page

In order to create a modular page, each of these four elements is read by the web server and combined into a single page. Some of the elements - like the Banner and the Footer - are used over and over by different pages.

We can Do It with Frames, DHTML, Server Side Includes (SSI), Cold Fusion, Active Server Pages (ASP).