My navigation bar and side bar exist as their own .html files and are blissfully unaware of the layout. I use JavaScript to be able to inject them into any page and voila, I've got a boilerplate page to copy anytime I want to add another page. Anything I add to my sidebar or navigation bar will update across all of my pages automatically, because they are basically just copying whatever is in the .html files to themselves! isn't that epic? I am really enjoying learning this.