With most websites, only part of the page changes when you go from one page to another. The parts
that don’t change usually include common regions like the header, a menu, and the footer. To create
web pages with a consistent layout, you need a way to define these relatively static regions in a
single template file. Versions of ASP.NET prior to 2.0 did not have a template solution, so you were
forced to duplicate your page layout on every single page in the website, or resort to weird programming
tricks. Fortunately, this is no longer the case due to master pages. The biggest benefit of master
pages is that they enable you to define the look and feel of all the pages in your site in a single location.
This means that if you want to change the layout of your site—for instance, if you want to
move the menu from the left to the right—you need to modify only the master page, and the pages
based on this master pick up the changes automatically.