Advice on Site Structure and a tiny question

[vectorian798]

K so I am using a template that I found on the internet from a template site that I thought looked really good. I've spent several hours sifting through the template, modifying colors and images as I needed etc. So now, I finally have a layout style page done and ready for the site.

The last website I made I just had one 'index.php' that via links passed in through the URL (yes, there was link validation to ensure no one injected something like "../../../etc/pwd" and lifted the passwords or something). So basically, the whole site ran from one single page with variables in the url.

Is this a good idea? It seems fine to me because I don't see any security threats or anything since I got that covered, and if I wanted to change the way the site looked, all the content and scripts etc would be in their own pages and the layout would need to be changed only in one page.

So yea any advice on site organization would be very much appreciated, since this next site is going to be bigger than the junk I've done before.

A tiny question:
To use an image as a submit button do I just throw in an <input type="image"> in the form? Many sites say this will do it but some throw in some javascript.

[drawmack]

you should have different pages due to the way that search engines index sites. However, you can split your html into two files.

1) All the html you need to output before the main body content

2) All the html you need to output after the main body content

Then you can just include these two files in all your scripts and when you redesign you only have to replace those two files and any associated css files.

[vectorian798]

Well what I'm doing is:
1. A file for top part of layout
2. A file for links along the top
3. A file for some mroe intermediate HTML
4. A file for the nav menu
5. A file for some more junk which also contains the include that includes whatever is linked to through the url (if it is valid)
6. A file for closing and footer

Each part of the website has its own page that is included into the layout.

Oh yea, and a CSS file.

[drawmack]

you really don't need all those different files, but I still don't recommend passing the actual page to load in as a parameter because your site will not be indexed properly by the search engines.

[vectorian798]

Oh! Do you mean that each page include the layout files and not a single layout file include the content pages? I didn't quite understand before hehe

[drawmack]

yup that's exactly what I mean. Then you still have your layout centalized but the search engines will index you properly as well.