I've always used Dreamweaver and have built my own templates using it. I'm now getting quite sick of Dreamweaver though, and want to move onto something more lightweight.

I've downloaded a trial of Espresso for Mac which looks decent. The only thing I'm having trouble migrating with is templates.

Is the only solution to use either PHP includes or a CMS? Neither would be a problem, but it would be good to keep my websites free of the need for any server-side technology. Obviously I don't want to just be copying and pasting pages because then if I have to edit the overall look of the website, I would then have to edit each page separately.

I know there are lots of HTML editors out there that don't use templating systems, so it would be interesting to hear everyone else's ways of getting around it.

Server side includes any time, any site. Played with templates years ago, got fed up with having to upload every page just because of a single change to something.

SSI/PHP/ASP makes it far more flexible.

Dreamweaver is really great for learning how to code. I used it for a very long time but now I have moved away from it and I am hand coding all my websites, which I would say is the next step. Gives you much cleaner code.

Well i am also using Dreamweaver i am in learning process hopefully will proceed to next step which is hand coding

Looks like it's server-side includes from now on then!

What would you do if a client specifically needs static pages though? Would it be best to build the whole thing using includes or a cms? And then copy / paste the code into static pages once it's all been approved?

What would you do if a client specifically needs static pages though

How would they know??

I don’t like the template system of the HTML editor as it adds some unnecessary code to the HTML file. I think its better to use server side includes or any CGI.