how to keep common elements of site consistent - basic web development question

If I'm creating a simple static site with a handful of pages, how do I deal with keeping the basic skeleton of the site (e.g. navigation bar, header, footer, sidebar) consistent?

I love the dreamweaver template function in which you create a template file that contains all the elements of your site that are common among all of your pages and it automatically updates on all pages when you开发者_开发问答 edit it. Apparently, there is nothing like this in Aptana which is the IDE I'm currently using.

Is there something like this in any other web development IDE?

The closest equivalent Aptana and Textmate have is "persistent includes" under the Commands > HTML > Includes menu. That allows you to reference another file using a special HTML comment, and then when you want to insert that referenced file's content, you'd run the Update Document command in that sub-menu, which would pull in the file contents and replace the special comment with it.

Obviously this isn't particularly dynamic, and you'd want to run Update document on all the files right before deploying the project. You could likely grab the command's source and turn it into a shell script that you run as part of your deployment.