This is the bain of my life at the moment. I prefer to build websites from scratch and do them the "traditional way" or - if I'm busy - use templates and customize them. I use a good old plain text link when it comes to "navigation bars" or site navigation as this, in my opinon, is the most seo friendly way. However, the bain is that whenever I want to add something to the navigation, I end up having to trawl through all my pages and add the new link. No doubt some of you are pissing yourselves laughing now! I dont' want to use a CMS but would like to be able to "manage" the nav bar in a similar fashion to the way a CMS would handle it without using lame and SEO killing dhtml navigation menus etc. Can anyone suggest to me the best method of doing this - think I've fallen behind the times!
Server-side includes. A single file is pulled into each of your regular files whenever you need it. Use one for the top and one for the bottom. <!--#include virtual="/top.html--> is an example of the code you'd use. You may need to change your apache config or .htaccess to allow .html files to be server-parsed along with .shtml files. If all files are parsed anyway there's no reason not to do that. I used to do that all the time before I moved to javascript for multiple level menus.