saving time by including headers and footers

[cmdr_bond]

I am trying to save time on my pages by saving the header and the footer in their own page and include them into each page on my site; therefore, if i need to change something on either of them, updating the whole site will be a breeze. Now, I'm trying to figure out how create the pages. I made a page called components.php that has a pageheader and pagefooter function. Now i have A LOT of html to paste for each part, but i dont want to format it all into php... how can I make the function echo all the text if it's not in proper php format?

thanks

[drew010]

theres no need to really make the html into php, you can mix the two up, heres how i usually do it

index.php

<?php include ("header.php"); ?>

regular html code of the index page can go here.  if i want i can mix <?php echo "PHP"; ?> in with the html.<br /><br />
Then finally when I'm done I can...<br />

<?php include ("footer.php"); ?>