Best practices for technical design

- or "how do I do that?

[DavidJohnny]

There is a lot of material out there to teach programming technologies for the web. But there seems to be very little on best practices. As my sites grow from a few dozen pages to?, I'm starting to run into situations where I can do what I want technically, but I'm probably not doing it in the best way.

An example. Just in the last few days I learned that a better way to handle repeated content (like my main site links that appear on every page) is to put them in one document and include the content from that doc in my link bar. Until I learned that, I would change 20 pages every time I made a change to a link. Until seeing that tip on Webmasterworld, I was not familiar with it.

So what advice on technical design would you give a newbie, with a fast growing site? If I'm planning a content site that will have a couple hundred pages, how best to approach it technically? Or maybe it's better to ask how to build a large site for easy management?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

If you are building your site using Dreamweaver or some other package that supports templates this will make things easier to handle.