Something that i often find with sites – people will start them just writing in html, as that’s the easiest thing to do with a WYSIWYG editor. As the site grows, it becomes ever more unmanageable, so eventually you may well need to think about putting things like page headers, footers, menus etc into separate files, which are then included on each page – that means when you need to change the menu that is on all 35 pages of your site, you only need to change one file!

Now then – the problem…. you need to use php to do this (or other scripting language, but i use php). by default, your server probably won’t parse html files for php code – why would it, as it’s extra work for the server, and if you have a .html or .htm extension, you would usually stick with plain html code.

The obvious solution is to simply rename all your files with a .php extension – but that causes problems in that if you have some incoming links to your site, and some pagerank for the existing pages, you lose it!

There is one solution of using 301 redirects, however i find it much easier to add 1 line to your .htaccess file, which tells the server to parse all your html files for php scripting!

here it is – the one line that solves all your problems……..

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html  .htm

and you’re done!  now you can start to make updating your rapidly growing website much easier.