I'm trying to decide the best way to provide templates for a bunch of not very technical web editors. Their tool will be Expression Web 3 (finally migrating away from Frontpage). They maintain two websites sites that have around 9,000 pages each. (fun, eh?)
My big hesitation about dynamic web templates is how pages get updated. If I have to change any of the common content, all "attached" webpages are physically modified using Frontpage-like metadata. That seems crazily redundant and prone to error.
An issue with master pages is that most web editors connect to subwebs instead of the root of the site for security reasons (so department A cannot screw up department B's content). In that scenario, I have to maintain a copy of the master page in every subweb because Expression Web will not allow them to browse back to the root.
With both template technologies, the web editors do not even see the header/footer at design time if I use server-side includes(!!).
So far I'm leaning towards master pages with server-side includes for actual header/footer. How would you approach this?
I might as well answer my own question now that this is being implemented. I went with Master pages and am glad I did. I was able to design in Visual Studio and provide master pages for both developers (who use Visual Studio) and content contributors (who use Expression Web). The two products consume master pages slightly differently. Expression Web has an unfortunate bug regarding content areas in the <head> section of a document (I don't think EW4 fixes it either). The bug can be worked around with a code snippet.
No includes were used.. just plenty of css, divs and lists. Bummer about EW4 is that the toolbar STILL cannot be customized, and design view STILL does a crappy job of interpreting css in some cases.