My unfinished webpage

God, this is driving me absolutely NUTS, ok here is what I am trying, bear with me here everyone, all HTML I Know is self-taught (ok, I did take a class on it, but teacher went so slowly I still ended up teaching myself everything before she got there)

I have a menu made already for my page, what I want to do is to have my actual content show up just left of the menu, WITHOUT the use of frames, as where it shows up above the same BG as my menu (WITHOUT having to copy and p[aster the menu code to each and every HTML page I make). Don't know if this makes any sense to you, but its the best I can explain it at 3am. Now, I have some ideas as what I need to learn in order to do this, but Im not sure what I need exactly, my 4 ideas where.

Some DHTML
Layering
SSS (server side scripting)
Client side scripting I haven't figured out how to do yet (I don't think its this one)

Now if anyone knows EXACTLY what I am looking for and has a webpage handy that woill allow me to learn this skill which evades me, PLEASE tell me that URL. And if anyone has a good informative webpage which you THINK has this kind of good info, also, PLEASE TELL ME. (Note: me fav place www.w3schools.com doesn't tell me how to do this at all)