Building websites - how do you do it?

From reading the title of this post you might assume that I am about to talk about what I do every day and have always done. You are only partly right.

The specific topic I am interested in is the building of completely flat websites. That is to say the type of delivery to a client which is made up of HTML, CSS and JavaScript that will never be integrated into a back-end, never have any other coding wrapped around it but will be kept as a series of flat pages.

This is something I have had to do recently for the first time in some time and the question of how to achieve such a thing in an elegant manner keeping the trials of development to a minimum occupies some of my time now.

What I did in this instance was use server side includes to include all the common components of each page from a central resource - this includes things like global navigation, a footer etc etc. When it came time to send the code to the client, I then ran an ANT script (as supplied by the esteemed Mr Alexander, once more a colleague) to output the flat pages.

This seemed to work well for me. However, I was not happy with the way this worked for the CSS and JavaScript code.

During development, I wanted the CSS and JavaScript code broken down into many files to help me find where code was, organise new code and bug fix. I wanted the convenience of loading Firebug and being able to see exactly where my style declarations came from on any particular node.

For the final delivery, I wanted one CSS file and just a few JavaScript files. But how to make that happen without breaking my ideals during development? Well, I could end up using ANT to piece it all together just like the HTML code. But that felt a bit messy and frankly, hand crafting XML is about the worst thing I can think of doing.

This is where I stop providing solutions and pose a question. How would you have prepared your build? How would you have made sure that during development you could pull in only the bits of JavaScript that should have been on each page and then built the flat files correctly? Its more complex than it at first appears....