The static route
When I built my first website, I wrote all of the HTML by hand. At that point, it was just HTML. It was annoying to replicate the navigation bar across every page, even though I only had a few pages to update.
I tried a few different methods, such as using frames, and adding the common code via Javascript. I also tried reducing the number of pages on the site that I needed to update, by adding a dropdown and opening some of the pages in a new window, sans navbar. The Javascript method stayed on the site for quite a while.